Tempting the Enemy (9 page)

“No one can hear me,” he mumbled, but obediently stopped crunching so loud. She’d told him like eight million times how important it was that he always do what she said. They weren’t safe anymore. The bad people who had broken into the house could still be looking for them. If Sarah hadn’t hidden with him under the house, they would be like everyone else in the family.

Gone to Heaven.

Emmitt blew out his breath, making a little cloud in front of him. He missed Mom and Dad. And Joey. Even 72

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Cora, even though all she ever did was cry and wake him up at night. But he didn’t want to be in Heaven yet.

“Are we almost there?”

“Almost.” Sarah looked behind herself again. She’d been doing that a lot. Since they got off the bus. She had that line between her eyebrows again.

Emmitt looked back too. Nothing there but the snow they’d been walking on, the road, black trees and the wall of the mountain across the street. He frowned, reaching with his senses the way Sarah had been trying to teach him. He could hear their breathing. Their heartbeats.

Sarah’s was faster than his. She started walking faster too.

“I think someone’s coming, Em.”

“I don’t hear anyone.”

“Neither do I.” She was scared again. Like she’d been under the house, when she had both her hands over his mouth to keep him from making any sound. She tugged on his hand. “Get on my back, honey, we need to run.”

Normally, Emmitt liked piggy-back rides. He was getting too big for them, though, so Sarah didn’t give them as much. But she was starting to scare him. He grabbed onto her shoulders, locking his arms around her neck while she held on to his legs.

She took off, the cold wind cutting at his face. No one could run like Sarah. She flew. For a second, he forgot to be scared, forgot they were running away from something and got excited at how fast she was going. She never ran this fas—

Sarah stopped moving, but Emmitt didn’t. He flipped off her back, soaring through the air before he landed in a heap and darkness swallowed everything but the pain.

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Emmitt blinked.

The light of the moon above made his eyes water. He tried to move, to breathe, but everything hurt. He’d landed on the road. The roughness scraped his fingers as he felt around with his fingertips, finding only snow and rocks.

He coughed, which hurt more.

“Sarah?”

Only the wind responded, whistling around the bend.

Emmitt curled his legs up, rolling to his side and groaning. His head hurt. He remembered then. Something had hit Sarah. Or tripped her. Fear shooting through him, Emmitt put his knees to the ground and raised his head.

For a second, his vision doubled, but finally came clear.

The road. The snow. The mountain.

But where was Sarah?

He got to his feet, trudging forward. Had they come this way? Or the other way? He looked behind him, but the trees didn’t look any different, so he couldn’t tell.

Shivering, he brushed at the tears on his cheeks. This was not the time to cry. Crying didn’t help, Sarah said.

But Sarah wasn’t here.

And he didn’t know where he was supposed to go.

“Sarah?” he tried again. He strained his hearing, reaching for anything that could be her. If she were hurting… But still, nothing.

Smell. He knew her smell. He wasn’t as good at scenting as Sarah was, but he could find her that way. If she wasn’t far. He pulled in a breath, the snowy wind so stinging he almost couldn’t find a smell. But finally, he recognized it behind the wet wood and the mud. Her soap.

She hated it, because it was so strong. Human soap, full of flowers. She always said a tracker could follow it for miles. But they’d needed to seem as much like humans as 74

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possible. And he didn’t need to follow for miles. Just enough…

He started left, but the scent faded, so he turned around. The crunching snow wasn’t as much fun now. He walked slow, trying to be quiet. He found the spot where she’d stopped, where her feet had scraped the snow into a lump. She wasn’t there. Emmitt looked around, trying to remember the lessons she’d tried to teach him. Sight, sound, smell, Instinct.

Listen for the voice, Emmitt. It’ll never lead you
wrong.

Squeezing his eyes shut, Emmitt made everything else in himself go quiet. He’d only heard that voice once, when the bad people crashed through the living room and it told him to find the special door his father showed him.

He’d tried to hear it for Sarah before, but it never seemed to have anything to say.

“Please,” he whispered, hands knotting in the wet socks. “Please help me.”

When it came, it was only a whisper.
Footprints…

Relieved, Emmitt looked around carefully. The snow was a smooth blanket, except for a smudge by a tree.

Looking around for some sign of anyone—anything—he moved to the smudge. Blood droplets stained the white.

Prints now, one set moving deeper into the trees. He followed them all the way to a clearing where the moon shone down between the leaves.

And that’s where he found her.

“S-Sarah?” She lay still on the ground, her hands spread out like when they made angels the first night they’d seen snow. But there wasn’t much here, most of it clumped on the branches over their heads. “Sarah?”

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Emmitt didn’t see the blood at first. It looked like part of her dark coat. But her hat had fallen off, her hair loose on the ground. Then he saw the hole where her chest used to be.

The world shrank in a heartbeat. She was gone. Like all the others. His knees melted and he fell. Numb, he simply stared at his sister. At her face, waiting for her to whisper that everything would be okay. But Sarah didn’t move. Didn’t look at him. Didn’t smile or take his hand.

Didn’t…anything.

“…shouldn’t…be…here…”

Don’t move.

Emmitt hunched in his coat, holding in a gasp by biting his lips together. The voice behind him didn’t sound like a person. A hiss, like a snake. But snakes didn’t talk. Did they?

“Run, little boy.”

Emmitt stared at Sarah, her face turning watery as fear made him quake. If he turned his head, he’d see whatever that thing was. And he didn’t want to see. He didn’t want to see.

“I said to
run!
”

Don’t move.

Emmitt huddled deeper into the coat, shuddering from head to toe. The voice telling him to run sounded like it came from everywhere, even in his head, like the Instinct. But it wasn’t the same. This was angry. The Instinct was calm. Urgently telling him not to move, but calm. The Instinct kept him alive. And that thing had killed Sarah. He tried not to sob. Wanted to reach out and take Sarah’s hand. If this thing killed him too, he wanted to be holding her hand.

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“No matter what happens, Em,” she’d said when they left Florida on the night bus, “we’ll face it together, okay?”

“Okay,” he whispered, reaching out his hand.

No!
the Instinct roared, but Emmitt ignored it. He curled his fingers in hers. At the same time, a howl like he’d never heard ripped through the trees. Turning his face toward the sound, he saw what had come to claim him.

But when he screamed, he never made a sound.

Chapter Seven

The detective’s idea of warming her up turned out to be a diner that put marshmallows in their hot chocolate.

And whipped cream. Jade licked her lips, trying not to smile at the hint of cinnamon she tasted. He wasn’t wrong, either. She was warm all the way through, she admitted, still huddled in his giant coat, both hands wrapped around an oversize mug.

Rysen draped his body across his entire half of the booth. Shoulders to the wall, one arm relaxed over the top of the padded seat while the other lay on the table in between them. He tapped an impatient finger on the rim of his more normal-sized coffee cup. “Three gonna be enough or do you need to suck down another one of those things?”

Another one would probably be ideal, but she didn’t want to push her luck with him. He’d let her drink in relative peace, checking his phone once for calls he didn’t seem interested in returning. His disturbing gaze remained thoughtful while she willed the chills to leave her body.

“This is good, thank you.”

He shook his shaggy head. “That’s the twelfth time you’ve thanked me and we’ve only been here an hour.”

“There’s nothing wrong with gratitude,” she replied stiffly.

“I can think of better ways you could show it.”

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She considered getting after him for complaining about his own libido—again—but she was too happy with her drink. She took another lick of the cream.

“What did you see?”

She looked up, startled. “What?”

“That signature thing. What did you see? Did it tell you anything useful?”

The cream soured on her tongue. She put the mug down carefully. “It doesn’t work like that. Usually,” she added, thinking of how they’d shared his thoughts through his color.

“Tell me how it does work,
usually
, because something sure as shit happened out there and I want to know what it was.”

She shouldn’t tell him, but she couldn’t bring herself to lie to him, either. “I can tell by sight, generally, what the strongest emotion is, by the shade of the color. If necessary, I can touch it and get a stronger…
scent
. It isn’t common that humans are strong enough psychics to leave an imprint that can truly affect me. I can see what they’re feeling without feeling it myself. There are times when humans can get through my defenses, but unless the imprinter has those kinds of abilities, the emotion has to be extreme. In this case…” She shivered again, remembering. “This killer’s signature is black. I’ve never seen that. Ever. Like he had no light in him at all.”

He shrugged. “When you do to people what he does, I wouldn’t expect there to be.”

“You don’t understand. Most signatures I see are transparent. Occasionally dense.” She thought of his, which had a light and life all its own; another mystery to solve. “This was opaque. Solid.” Evil, but he wouldn’t Dee Tenorio

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appreciate such a childish description. “His anger and hatred is so strong it stains his soul and everything he touches.”

“Is that what happened to you? It stained you?”

She looked down at her hand, once again safely ensconced in her glove, and pulled her fingers into a fist.

It still stung, deep into her flesh. “It tried.”

“Didn’t the Instinct warn you?” He leaned toward her, hand flat to the table. Almost as if he meant to reach out and touch her. He kept his hand where it lay. “Why didn’t you listen?”

Instinct? She shook her head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

He straightened in his seat, suddenly looking at her the way he had back in the interrogation room. As nothing but an enemy to be destroyed.

Jade felt the rejection in her heart, like a wound. It hurt, oddly, throwing her off balance. Or maybe that wasn’t all of it. She realized her sense of him had disappeared, taking with it part of the warmth she hadn’t realized had come from him. Had his color rejected her too? “What? I fail some kind of test?”

“Yes.”

Well, at least he didn’t make her guess. Much.

“That’s all it takes, then? I don’t know the vocabulary, so now I’m expendable again? Thanks, thanks a lot.” She wanted to throw the hot chocolate at him, but that’d be a despicable waste of ambrosia.

“You don’t have to be taught about the Instinct. It’s part of every Wolf. It’s what keeps us alive.” His voice had a little too much Wolf in it to be anything but angry.

“Even you should hear it.”

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Hear. She thought back and sighed. Somehow, she didn’t expect him to be reassured to know she understood.

“You mean the Voice. The one that tells you what to do when you’re scared.”

His hackles lowered slightly.

Just wait
, she thought morbidly. “I stopped hearing that years ago.”

As she expected, he shook his head at her, looking almost reviled. “You mean you stopped listening.”

A cardinal crime, apparently.

“I had to.” The Voice and the Sisters who’d trained her to use her gifts were too often at odds. She’d never have survived if she hadn’t learned to conform. “I’m a Sibile.” As if that would explain everything.

Maybe it did. Rysen’s cool gaze swept over her once, twice. “Why do you cripple yourself for them? When they’d end you without thinking twice.”

“I’m not crippled!” But even as she said it, she knew it for a lie. The way his eyes narrowed, he knew it too.

But she owed him no explanations. The way he turned on a dime, she had no inclination to give him any either.

Liar.

It wasn’t the Voice, but she squelched it anyway.

“You wouldn’t think twice either, so don’t presume to judge me.”

In the ensuing silence, his finger tapped the table again. His guard came down slowly. When he spoke, his voice was soft. Almost comforting. “There’s more to you than what the Sibile would have you think.”

She knew that. Just as she knew without looking that his color was wrapping around her again, tighter than before. She could feel its tug.

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“There’s power in being a Wolf too.”

“I don’t crave power.” She had plenty. She craved control.

His gaze remained speculative. “What I’m getting at is that purposely cutting off that part of yourself weakens you. You need to understand what makes you a Wolf just as much as you needed to know what made you a Sibile.

Until you do, you’re vulnerable. In this world, that means you’re dead.”

He left unspoken that he included the people who raised her on the list of those who would take advantage.

But where would she go if not to them? Rysen offered her no security, not even from himself. He wanted her, a response he couldn’t shut off any more than she could, but not by choice. With every glance, she could practically hear him reminding himself she was Sibile.