The Shifters (11 page)

I
t was a silent walk back to the compound, Ryder sunk in thought, and Caitlin not knowing what to say. It was a relief to reach the gate.

She stopped in front of it, drawing herself up. “Okay, you've walked me home. I'm fine. You can—”

“Come in and say good-night to your sisters,” Ryder said unexpectedly, and reached past her to push the gate open.

Caitlin was reeling that the gate was unlocked, thinking that either her sisters had gone crazy to make a mistake like that, or that Ryder could actually open gates without that little tool of his…and then
she realized the gate had actually opened from inside, and Shauna was standing there, looking royally pissed. “Of all the stupid, thoughtless, insensitive stunts…!”

Fiona was right behind her, nudging Shauna aside with a warning look. “All right, all's well that ends well.”

Fiona shot Ryder a grateful look as she hugged and kissed Caitlin, and as soon as her sister's arms went around her, Caitlin felt a wave of guilt. She hadn't meant to cause anyone any grief, but then again, she never meant harm with anything she did, and somehow it always ended in disaster anyway.

“I'm sorry,” Caitlin mumbled.

“Where
were
you?” Shauna demanded.

“We did find the shifters. And we did learn some fairly interesting things,” Ryder said, stepping in smoothly, and Caitlin was aware that on some level he was trying to help her off the hot seat.

Well, fine, let him explain, then.

She shot Ryder a chilly look. “You can fill them in. I'm going to bed.” And before anyone could say a word to stop her, she was stalking toward her wing of the house, fleeing through the garden toward welcome solitude.

In her bedroom, she jerked impatiently at the laces of her bodice, roiling with uncontrolled thoughts and feelings. As she pulled the dress over her head, she
smelled the acrid residue of crack smoke clinging to the fabric and felt a stab of guilt, unease, even fear. For a moment she could hear the seething hatred of the thing that had spoken through Danny.

She tossed the dress aside with revulsion, wrapped her short silk robe around her and stepped to the French doors to look up at the moon, brooding.

There was a bigger malevolence to these entities than she had realized. The one they had talked to through Danny had a controlled, cunning plan to wreak havoc. And that very same entity had killed Ryder's sister. That fact gave the whole convergence of forces a fatedness that Caitlin was not about to take lightly.

She turned from the French doors—and almost screamed.

Ryder was standing in the middle of her bedroom floor, watching her.

She bit back the scream and crossed her arms, glaring at him. “Can you walk through walls now?”

“Spiders, remember?” he answered, arms crossed, looking down at her. “I don't usually do arachnids, but I needed something quick and small. And it's very easy to shift right now….”

Samhain,
she thought.

“Oh. Right,” she conceded sullenly. “Well, you can't just walk in anywhere you want to. It's trespassing.”

She moved to step around him, but he sidestepped with her, blocking her.

“I'll leave if you want me to. The thing is…” He moved in closer, almost touching her. “I don't think you want me to.”

She could feel the heat of his whole body resonating against hers. Another inch and he would be brushing against her, and her whole being seemed concentrated in that hot core of her. “And
I
certainly don't want to,” he added huskily.

She wasn't breathing now, and her entire skin seemed magnetically drawn to his, and yet he didn't touch her.

“Tell me not to kiss you,” he said.

“Don't kiss me,” she said, and closed her eyes as his mouth crushed down on hers.

His lips were hot and demanding; his hands were on the curve of her butt, pulling her against him, grinding sensuously through the thin cloth of her robe; and she was making those animal sounds again.

“God,” he said roughly against her ear, and then she felt his tongue slide down her neck and she nearly fainted, except that his arm around her waist kept her upright.

Her breasts were straining under his hands, her nipples hard pellets of sensation. He ripped open her
robe and closed his mouth around her left breast, sucking and licking until she was moaning…. She tried to push him away, but she had no strength in her arms. Her nails dug into his shoulder, and he transferred his mouth to the other breast, his hair brushing her skin as he tongued her aching nipple.

His hand slid between her legs, pulling her panties aside, and his thumb was stroking her then, his fingers dipping into her hot wetness, and she arched her back, moving in rhythm with his fingers, her breath coming short and fast as she felt her orgasm spiraling up through her, coiling her body as her muscles contracted in waves of heat and her wetness poured down his fingers. He groaned, lifting his head from her breast and covering her mouth with his, invading her with his tongue as he lowered her down onto the edge of the bed.

As she sank back in delirious exhaustion, he pulled her robe off her shoulders, tossing it against the wall, then stood to strip off his pants. He was huge; the thick length of him engorged, his pelvic muscles taut and cut, his abs jumping with the tension of his desire.

She pushed herself up on her elbows and edged back instinctively, overwhelmed by the hard maleness of him, the unmistakable purpose in his eyes.

He grabbed her ankles and pulled her down to the edge of the bed, took her wrists and held them
above her head as he pushed her thighs apart with one knee, and now the head of his shaft was brushing against her sex, teasing her swollen flesh, stroking the cleft of her as she arched her back, straining toward him, incoherent, begging him, “Please…please…” And then he thrust forward and drove the length of him into her hot wetness, and she cried out with the rough friction against her sensitized flesh, the waves of sensation already building as he plunged into her. She was filled to overflowing, insane with the pleasure of his hugeness inside her, the weight of him on top of her, the stroke of his naked skin against hers. And then the wave broke and she was gasping in tandem with his growl of release, the hot waves of his pleasure as she contracted compulsively around him…both of them crying out in rhythm as their bodies spasmed together.

They sank into her pillows, sweating, panting, shaking…. Caitlin felt raw, more naked than she had ever been, completely stripped, exposed to her very core.

Ryder reached over and took her face in his hands as he wrapped a leg possessively around her, drawing her body against his as he kissed her mouth, her brow, her eyes.

“You are so lovely.”

S
he was half asleep, but she could tell that she was in bed, naked and wanton from a second bout of lovemaking. She felt raw and tender inside, but still hungry. Ryder was kissing her breasts, her neck, and crazily, she felt her nipples harden again, her sex start to ache. His fingers slipped between her legs, stroking and teasing until she moaned and opened under him…and then he was moving on top of her, pinning her with the weight of him. She was incoherent now, begging for him, and he shoved his hands under her, lifted her buttocks in both hands and thrust himself in to the hilt, filling her with his throbbing heat….

Her eyes were closed as she writhed against the pillows, gasping as each hot thrust took her to the edge of madness….

She opened her eyes…and saw a demonic face, monstrous, forked tongue waggling, vile with lust.

She screamed.

Someone was shaking her then, calling her name. “Cait. Cait!”

She scrambled up in terror, pressing her back against the headboard of the bed, eyes wide with shock.

“
Cait
,” Ryder said. “It's not real. You were dreaming.”

She gasped, let her breath out shakily, as she recognized her own room around her and saw Ryder kneeling on the bed beside her, freaked.

“Oh, God,” she managed shakily. Gently he pulled her into his arms, and she slowly settled against his chest, felt his heart beating in time with hers, strong and real.

“I'm sorry,” she said automatically, and he tensed.

“You have nothing to be sorry about.” He pulled back slightly so he could look down at her. “You've been through way too much in the last few days. It's about time you got frightened.”

She felt an uncomfortable wave of vulnerability
and tried to pull back from him, but he held her more firmly.

“Oh, no. You stay here. No pulling away.” He leaned back and cuddled her against him until she breathed out and relaxed into him, letting him hold her. “Better,” he whispered, kissing her hair.

She shivered violently. “It was that thing. It was trying to get inside me. Forcing itself inside me. It was horrible.” To her chagrin, she found herself in tears. Ryder held her closer. “I knew it would kill, that it
wanted
to kill me.”

She twisted in his arms and looked at him. “They don't care about staying in one body. They like burning through bodies. They'll never be satisfied. We have to stop them.”

“We do,” Ryder agreed. His face was troubled. “The question is, how? Mass exorcism? Mass binding? I've never seen such a huge collection of entities before. They can be bound one at a time, but a whole flock of them…” His face was shadowed in the candlelight. “I don't know how to start.”

“We need a council meeting,” Caitlin said. “All the communities. Some of the vampires have been around for centuries. Someone must know how to stop them.”

Ryder was silent beside her.

“What?” she asked softly.

“I'm not used to working with anyone,” he admitted. “Much less a whole community.”

Caitlin thought of her parents, the dream they had of the communities working together, working for peace, and felt for the first time that she might understand it.

“It's our best hope,” she said, and meant it. Ryder was silent, but she felt his arms tighten around her, and she was overwhelmed by the desire to stay there, always stay exactly as they were. Her heart hurt with it.

Ryder put his hand to her face suddenly and turned her head toward him, looking deep into her eyes. “Yes,” he said, and she had no time to wonder what he meant before he kissed her, and then she forgot everything else as her body rose to his.

 

When Caitlin woke again to soft daylight, Ryder was wrapped around her. She lay still, feeling the huge weight of him, the silky softness of his skin, the power in the bulging muscles in his arms and thighs, the enticingly flat plane of his stomach against her back.

She was sore all over, most especially inside. And she was dismayed to find the throbbing she felt between her legs was not just soreness but desire. She wanted more, wanted him again, wanted him to hold her down and take her, again and again and again, until she was begging him to stop….

Begging. Oh, she had begged, all right, but not for him to stop. She had begged him for more…and more and more.

Her face flamed, remembering. She felt exposed, vulnerable, owned, used, helpless. That was the worst. She felt dependent, weaker than she'd ever felt in her life. She needed him, craved him, and he could go away any second. He was a shifter; there was no way to trust him.

One inch, one breath at a time, she eased herself out of his arms until she was standing. She hadn't woken him, but she felt cold, bereft, and longed to throw her self back into bed—back into
his
bed, because it didn't even feel like her own bed anymore—back into his arms….

No.

She forced herself to back up quietly and slipped into the bathroom, where she showered in water as hot as she could make it, scrubbing herself raw, trying in vain to remove his touch from her skin.

 

Ryder woke luxuriously in a bed redolent with Caitlin's perfume and the smell of sex. His erection was hot and hard and throbbing with wanting her, and he growled in his throat and reached for her…to find nothing, no one.

He sat up, blinking against a shaft of light from the windows. He could feel no sense of her in the
room or anywhere else, and heard nothing, either, but a slow drip from the shower.

 

Caitlin sat in Fiona's kitchen, dressed as austerely as she could manage in a black turtleneck and gray jeans, her hands wrapped around her third mug of coffee. She was wired and nervous as a cat, and every time she moved she could feel Ryder on top of her, and feel her face burn and her chest flush with heat.

Luckily Shauna was chattering on, filling the silence, but Caitlin had seen Fiona glance at her appraisingly several times already. No way to hide anything from her—ever.

Caitlin reached for a croissant and smothered it with raspberry jam. Her hands were shaking so much she could barely hold the knife.

The front door opened, and she jumped about a mile. All three sisters went still, listening, then relaxed as they heard male voices and then Jagger stepped through the kitchen door, followed by Ryder.

The shifter was freshly scoured, in a leather jack et and tight jeans, and Caitlin could smell the combination of leather and pheromones from where she sat. She felt her pulse jump and blood throb between her legs.

“Look what I found on the street,” Jagger announced to the sisters. Ryder glanced at Caitlin,
and her heart was in her throat. Every detail of last night was in his eyes as he looked at her; they might have been naked in her bedroom right there, and she wouldn't have stopped him if he took her on the kitchen table.

She looked away from him and gulped coffee.

“Excellent,” Fiona enthused. She pressed a mug of coffee into Ryder's hands. “Can I make you an omelet? We have croissants and juice and pastries on the table.”

“Just this for now,” Ryder said, lifting the mug, and glanced innocently at Cait.

Shauna was already up, demanding of Jagger, “The autopsy?”

Jagger looked to the three sisters. “Some of the signs are there. Massive adrenaline spike. Heart failure.”

“But the chemicals are wrong,” Shauna finished for him. Jagger nodded silently. “So it
was
a walk-in. Possessing a were.” Shane scowled.

“Which means even the Others are at risk,” Fiona said tensely.

“Not just at risk,” Ryder said. “If the lead entity has been hiding in one body, it may be using the body of an Other.”

“It could be anyone, then,” Shauna said.

“Hiding in plain sight,” Ryder said, underlining the possibility.

“We need the Council to meet tonight,” Caitlin said. “We can't wait.”

“Yes,” Jagger said.

The five of them looked around at each other, and Fiona suddenly stood up from the table. “Then let's do it.”

Caitlin saw Ryder meet Jagger's eyes, glance to ward the door. Neither of her sisters saw it, she realized.

Jagger stepped over to Fiona. “I have a full day—is there anything you need from me?”

“Go,” Fiona said. “I'll call Armand, and we'll send out a summons. All you have to do is show up.”

As Fiona started to walk Jagger to the door, Ryder looked toward Shauna and asked casually, “Bathroom?”

Shauna pointed. “First door to the left.”

Caitlin pretended not to watch as Ryder walked casually out. She started clearing the table and then slipped out after him.

She hurried into the hall just in time to see Ryder shift.

She'd seen Case and Danny shift before, but as accustomed as she was to weirdness in her role as a Keeper, to other facets of reality, witnessing a shift was always unnerving. She wasn't sure if other, less
attuned people would experience it in the same way, but for herself, she felt a queasy sense of not just the shifter but all of reality shifting around her, a momentary dissolving of anything concrete and tangible, while the shifter's body rearranged its molecules into something else entirely.

It happened now, and the nausea was instantaneous and racking as Ryder…melted, which was as close as her rational brain could come to describing it, and then there was a raven there in his place, a huge black bird, and he was flying out the open French doors and over the courtyard.

The room slowed its shimmering and returned to something resembling normal.

Caitlin held on to the wall and gagged from the dizziness, the overwhelming feeling of vertigo….

Then she forced herself to straighten and bolted toward the stairs after him.

 

Jagger waited on the outside of the compound wall, beside the gate. He turned at the rustle of wings as the raven landed on the gate, and then the air shimmered and Ryder stood in front of him.

The men regarded each other warily.

Jagger was the first to speak.

“I gather you don't think much of this plan.”

Ryder shrugged. “Too many cooks.”

Jagger's face tightened. “That's the way this city
works. The communities work together. That's how we keep the peace: coexistence.”

“Yes, yes, very high-minded of you all, and I'm just a lone gunman. But the only thing I think this meeting is useful for is to see if a walk-in shows up in the body of one of your friends.”

 

Slipping through the front door, Caitlin willed her feet to step lightly and ran at her most silent across the courtyard, coming to an abrupt halt just behind the wall, with the fountain providing cover so she could listen to the two men standing just outside the gate.

 

Ryder looked to the vampire and kept his voice level. “Do what you have to do, it's your city. But you have to know this. It's the Keepers who are the most vulnerable here.”

He saw Jagger tense with suspicion as well as with worry, and felt a stab of satisfaction as he continued inexorably. “And not just Caitlin but all three of them. The lead entity is already aware of Caitlin, has directly threatened her twice, and I'd be shocked if it doesn't know of all of them. So do what you need to do, bring others into it, have your Council meeting, but know that every second we don't take action is giving these things an opening, and your woman is in the direct line of fire—just like mine.”

 

Behind the fountain, Caitlin's heart leaped at his words.
His woman? Is it true? Is that how he thinks of me?
She eased closer to the wall to make sure she heard everything.

“Your woman?” Jagger was saying contemptuously. “Don't tell me you intend to stick around town after you've done what you came to do.”

Ryder was silent, and Caitlin's heart plummeted. Finally he muttered, “What I do, where I stay, is none of your business, vampire.”

“It
is
my business if it has to do with Cait,” Jagger said coldly. “She's family now, my sister.”

Caitlin felt a strange disorientation, a burning in her chest.
His sister? Me?

Jagger continued. “You may have no conception of family, but make no mistake, shifter, I'll kill anyone who even thinks of hurting her.”

Ryder was surprisingly and uncharacteristically silent. Behind the wall, Caitlin held her breath, hoping for him to jump in, to say something, anything….

Nothing but silence and the soft rustling of the wind in the trees.

Jagger snorted contemptuously. “As I suspected. So I'm telling you now. If your intentions aren't honorable, back off from Caitlin. Leave her free to find her own happiness. She deserves that.”

Caitlin felt hot tears in her eyes, but what was
making her cry, she couldn't have said. Jagger's words…or Ryder's silence? She only knew she felt torn up inside.

And still nothing but silence from beyond the wall.

And then—finally—Ryder said, “I'll leave her alone,
brother
. Just don't interfere with my investigation.”

Caitlin felt his words like a white-hot blow.
He doesn't care, then. It was nothing serious. He was only toying with me, and Jagger knew it.

She felt as if her whole heart had dropped out of her body, felt like a complete fool, used and discarded like so much garbage.

“Right,” Jagger said. “I'll see you tonight, then.”

“I'll be there,” Ryder answered roughly, and then Caitlin heard footsteps, two sets going in opposite directions, quickly fading down the street.

She leaned back against the fountain, sick with betrayal—and grief.

 

Somehow she made her way back to Fiona's rooms, knowing that she had to go on, to act as if everything was normal and fine. She had to make everyone think she was all right.