Darkness Bred (10 page)

S
ean’s house nestled deep in the forest that melded with the mature trees covering a good deal of Leigh’s land.

Numb inside and out, Elin was grateful to curl up in a blanket on a couch in front of the fire Sean built as soon as they got to the two-story building. There was also a basement, where he said Innes lived, but either Innes wasn’t at home or he was sleeping. The place was silent.

“When Ethan and Campion want a place to rest up, they come here, too,” Sean said. “Sometimes we must all go to Niles…” He screwed up his eyes at her. “You don’t need to worry about that yet.”

Elin nodded. She had nothing to add to the conversation. It was obvious that the Team was in charge. She decided to let Sean be the one to speak next, which might take time since he showed signs of having moved into another world at the moment.

“You do understand, don’t you?” Sean said so abruptly, she jumped. “Why we made the decision we did about Molly?”

She breathed in deeply and pulled the blanket up around her ears. “No.” She shook her head. “I don’t know what the police could do to help, but they should be told. The same as they should be told about Rose. I was surprised when Sally didn’t even seem particularly interested in the decision to let Saul do an autopsy on Molly, but Cliff amazed me. He looked unaffected, like he didn’t care. He just wanted to get back to work.”

“He’s a loner, or so I’ve been told,” Sean said. “He doesn’t interfere in other people’s business. I don’t know his history but I think there’s something there he doesn’t talk about.”

“If you’re all so worried about me blabbing your secrets, why are you comfortable with Sally and Cliff?”

“I’m not worried about you. Sally’s been involved in hound affairs for some time. So far she’s proved trustworthy. The moment we think otherwise, things will change.”

Elin didn’t like the way that sounded. She didn’t like the way a lot of what the Team said sounded. They spoke as if their decisions were beyond argument and often as if they wouldn’t think a whole lot about doing away with anyone they considered a nuisance.

A tap sounded at the front door and Sean hurried to answer. He returned with Sally, who carried two floral duffel bags. “Supplies,” she sang out to Elin, bustling into the spartan living room. “If I didn’t still want to get back into the fae compound and spend time with some old friends, I’d use my favorite trick on Tarhazian. How dare she make you cold at this time of year.”

Pokey chose that moment to wiggle into view and examine the bags. She grabbed a licorice pipe and stuck it in her mouth. But she chewed rapidly and quickly nibbled all the way to the bulb.

“I brought that for you, Elin,” Sally said, frowning at the guinea pig. “She isn’t getting any better behaved. Should I take her back with me and see if I can train her?”

“You won’t be able to,” Elin said, grinning. “She’s impossible.”

Sally pulled in the corners of her mouth. “And you like her that way.”

“What do you mean by favorite trick?” Sean said, and Elin decided he could be very single-minded.

“Secret,” Sally said. “But if you value your finger and toenails, don’t get on the wrong side of me.”

Pokey hummed all the way under a gap in the blanket, where she disappeared.

Sally didn’t wait for more reaction but hefted the bags onto the couch beside Elin. “I think just about everything will be too big but at least it will keep you warm. You’ll be fine for boots and shoes, though. I had some I’d made for the, er, smaller customers that come to the shop.” She rummaged around in the bag and pulled out something made of heavy wool. “This coat looks like a blanket. It was Phoebe’s but she’s got a new one—or new to her. She found it at Wear It Again.”

“That’s going to be warm,” Elin said, eyeing a plaid wool coat that zipped up the front and had a fur-lined hood.

Pokey popped her nose out and hovered, watching what Sally produced and humming excitedly over anything she thought resembled food.

By the time Sally got to the bottom of the bags, Elin couldn’t imagine needing another piece of clothing—at least until summer.

“Saul gave me this for you,” Sally said, handing a folded piece of paper to Sean. “He said Elin should see it, too. And he wants to know if there is some special weapon you could use in emergencies, Elin? Something unusual?”

Elin looked at her sharply. “What makes him ask that?” Surely the power of the green that Leigh had told her about wasn’t common knowledge.

“Saul said he hoped you might be good at protecting yourself, that’s all.”

The idea appealed to her. She would go after some of the diamond-hard crystal from the green just as soon as she could.

Sean and Sally looked at her enquiringly, waiting, she knew, for her to reveal some magical defense. The gift of the green-born crystal was Deseran. Unless she could be sure those like her would want the information shared with anyone outside, she would keep it to herself. Her skin tightened. She should have told Sean she was Deseran a long time ago.

“What kind of defense, I wonder.” Sean looked amused.

For the first time Elin really thought about being part of a singular group. They had been born to paranormal people who decided these children would not fit into the world of their parents. Who knew how many Deseran there were? Someone ought to. They all ought to—they had a bond. She glanced from Sally to Sean and smiled slightly.

She belonged to a special race. An odd happiness bubbled in her.

Sean shrugged, and without another word, he passed her the paper from Saul. “The mark is developing,” was all it said.

Once Sally had left, Elin leaped off the couch and gripped Sean’s arms. “That mark again,” she said. “He can only mean—”

He put a finger to his lips. “Who knows what could give an intruder access to our conversation?” he said.

“I feel intruders,” she told him, blushing. “Not always, but strong forces bring an awareness even if I can’t identify them exactly. I felt it when Saul was coming into Phoebe’s bookshop.”

After giving her a very long look, he reached into the pile of clothes, took the first sweater he found, and pulled it over her head. Long, made of green mohair, it reached below her knees. Her thin dress bunched into an irregular frill that flopped all around.

Fluffy black socks reached under the dress to her knees. “I won’t be cold now,” she said, looking at Sean and daring him to make nasty comments about the awful outfit.

“Absolutely not,” he said without a hint of a smile.

“You and Niles went outside to talk about getting the Team together,” Elin said. “That can’t wait long, can it?”

“It will all fall into place. We won’t make obvious or sudden changes but I prefer for him to initiate any discussions with all of us. When he says he thinks it’s time, we’ll go—if that’s ever really necessary.”

She didn’t miss the “we.” “Niles doesn’t want me,” she reminded him.

“I’m not leaving you behind,” Sean said. He lifted her right hand to his mouth and kissed each finger, then her palm. Elin shivered.

“He is worried about Leigh and the pregnancy. I am to take primary control of the Team until Niles can give it his all. Now I vote we try to sleep for a few hours, then get to Gabriel’s early,” he told her. “If anything is being circulated about Molly, we’ll hear about it.”

Sean nodded to the hallway leading past the living room and away from the front door. “There are two bedrooms that way. Take your pick. They each have a bathroom.”

Elin hadn’t summoned up enough courage to say what she intended to say about that. “I’m worried about Gabriel. He loves—loved her. She was strange and we all knew it, but he would have done anything for her.”

“She was used,” Sean said. “Her death is a warning.”

Elin considered that. “I think you’re right. And they may kill again and again,” Elin said. “Weakening everyone they hate—or discount—as they go. Fear paralyzes people and they stop doing anything to help themselves—that’s what this could be intended to do. Make us all helpless so we can just be picked off.”

“What do you think about the story Saul told us?” Sean took her by the shoulders and looked down into her face. “I want to know what The One needs so badly.”

“We don’t want to find out by becoming his victims,” Elin said.

“A living sorcerer vampire who feeds on parts taken from the living.” Sean scrubbed at his face. “If someone doesn’t go after him and neutralize him, he’ll spread horror everywhere. I think he’s getting desperate. Why else would he start drawing attention to what he’s capable of doing? I’m going to find out whatever I can and take him out.”

Argument didn’t make any points with Sean; that was already clear. Elin swallowed what she wanted to say. If he went to The Island, she would follow him and she still had ways of doing that.

“Sleep,” Sean said, not meeting her eyes. He gave her a quick, hard hug, tipped up her chin, and kissed her. “Good night, sweetheart.”

He guided her into the hallway, past the open door of a small study, to two side-by-side doors. Sean threw open both doors to reveal apparently identical bedrooms with big beds covered with old-fashioned quilts and very little other furniture.

“Just a minute,” he said. “Let me get all those clothes. Choose a room.”

Elin went through the first door, smiling to herself and crossing her arms as she considered her next move.

S
ean closed the bedroom door behind him, pulled off his shirt, and did a belly flop across the bed.

Sainthood had never been his ambition. Only a saint or a sadist would wish Elin good night and walk away to another bedroom, especially when every signal from the woman in question was that she wanted him with her.

He thumped his fists on the bed in frustration. This room and the one Elin had chosen were only used when Team members stayed over. His own bedroom was upstairs but he wanted to be close to Elin.

Damn, he wanted to be close to her, and that didn’t mean separated by a wall.

It was no accident that both rooms were built into the center of the house so neither had windows. He had stood outside Elin’s door until she locked it with a key on her side. Rolling half onto his side, he worked a key from his jeans pocket and held it up to sparkle in the bedside lamplight. The duplicate key to her room, not that he would need it if he suddenly had to get in.

First he tossed down the key, then turned out the light.

He liked the darkness. It was always his advantage—over anyone or anything not in the circle of werehounds with perfect night-sight.

Sean thrashed in the bedcovers and shut his eyes tightly. Maybe if he didn’t keep looking around the room while he listened for even the slightest sound that shouldn’t be among the night sounds of the house, he would sleep. Or at least the hypersensitivity flaying his skin would stop.

In the morning after they went to Gabriel’s to feel out any change in atmosphere there, he would have Sally, with Innes as muscle protection, make sure Elin didn’t follow him when he left. Saul had to be persuaded to make a trip to The Island, taking Sean with him.

Niles wouldn’t like it, but with luck they would learn something useful enough to shorten his furious reaction without Sean having to point out that, as acting Team leader, he could make up his own mind what to do—def
eren
tially, of course.

The tension in his brow, so tight it hurt, began to soften and he breathed more easily. He wasn’t sleepy but his face and neck, and his scalp, relaxed.

He must be falling asleep.

Throwing off the covers, he stretched out on the mattress. The faintest current of warm air stroked over his naked body and he smiled. This was what he needed, this release from vigilance, if only for a short while.

Sean drifted.

Like fingertips barely brushing the hairs on his legs, light touches passed from his ankles to his shins, grew infinitesimally firmer, and ran back and forth over his thighs, from knee to groin. Each time the touch flitted across his groin, he jumped, but then relaxed again.

Sean turned onto his stomach, pushed the pillows from the bed, and rested his brow on his forearms.

You are loved.

Startled, staring into the darkness at the table by the bed, the single white chair against a wall, he turned the thought over and over in his mind. It had come unbidden, like an emphatic voice telling him something he had never expected to hear.

Like Elin’s voice but he had to be hearing what he wanted to hear. They hadn’t progressed far enough, telepathically, for her to reach him like that.

Kneading at the base of his skull, down his neck, and along his shoulders made him sigh. He felt knots in his muscles dissolve.

A gentle vise clamping his sides brought another start. But the sensation, insistent, brushing to his spine, rubbing down to his buttocks, and exploring the hard flesh there, had him on total but willing alert.

This wasn’t a dream.

This wasn’t a trick of the air currents.

But this was most definitely a trick and Sean figured he’d already guessed the practitioner after all.

Breathing harder, wiping stinging sweat from his eyes, he flung over to his back again. He would swear his little angel had not known another man but she knew far more about how to please one than she should.

For what felt like hours, hands he could not see or touch caressed his body in almost every intimate way imaginable, and some he hadn’t even imagined.

Sometimes, he told himself, this had nothing to do with Elin, that she couldn’t possibly achieve such a thing and he was reacting to sexual deprivation. Then he rose to the tippy edge of climax again, only to be thwarted on the brink, and he could not believe this was not Elin’s doing. She had touched him before, pressed herself to him before, and although never like this, he decided she had saved her full power for when she could have her way with him.

His smile faded quickly. There was no doubt that the imprint of her lips was on his. He knew her mouth now, would always know it, and she kissed him provocatively as if beckoning him to come to her.

You are loved.

“And you are loved.”
Since the channel was obviously open, he spoke into her mind.
“I will always love you and keep you. Now, go to sleep.”

In the stillness that followed, he grinned. She had bewitched him but not broken his will. Not that he wouldn’t like to let her break it.

A moment later, the caress was back.

From his neck, over his chest, into the dip at his navel, down the slender line of dark hair below to the flare around what he longed for her to touch most, the wickedly magical fingers progressed like a hot sigh in the night.

Sean held still. Since she wasn’t physically with him, he couldn’t do a thing to either stop or assist her.
“I think you should go to sleep.”
His mind didn’t pant so she shouldn’t know he could hardly breathe, that his body was damp all over, that while he spoke like a schoolmaster to a difficult child, he was dying for want of her finishing this long, exquisite torture.

She wanted him to go to her and make love.

This deliberate teasing to the point where he wasn’t sure his legs would bear his weight, and wasn’t sure he could stay where he was, would only make sure he found a way to tantalize her even more.

The touch left him.

She might as well have put him in chains before she gave up her quest. There wouldn’t be any peace for him tonight. When he had the energy, he’d shower. And he’d also see how much she liked being roused really early to go to Gabriel’s. After all, she couldn’t have been in a deep sleep while she took him into a sweet hell.

A silky veil settled over his face.

Over his body, inch by inch, The Veil slithered. He tried to capture it but found nothing.

The scent of the forest touched with lemon reached him. The scent of Elin’s hair. Oh, help him, he couldn’t resist much longer.

Pine, fir, cedar, lemon—they filled the room and her hair brushed over his belly, his hips, his penis.

She pulled him into a heated place, dragged his hips from the bed, again and again while he lay, not helpless, but strong and eagerly meeting her.

His senses cascaded, unstoppable and wrenching and so intense he only wanted to hold on to the feelings forever. But they slowed, receded, and he lay there, his heart pounding. How could it have stopped just when he needed it most?

Minutes passed before a small voice in his mind said,
“Was that right?”

He covered his face with both hands. No one would believe this had happened to him.
“Perfect,”
he told her.

“Good,”
she said.