When Passion Lies: A Shadow Keepers Novel (4 page)

“He is currently in hiding.”

“From Lihter,” Luke said, nodding. “If Lihter’s taken his daughter, that suggests that Reinholt has something Lihter wants. Any idea what that is?”

“Not yet. Again, I expect the situation will become significantly more clear after we meet.”

Luke nodded. “Considering he’s hiding, I doubt his information is going to be useful.”

“A valid concern,” Tiberius admitted. “But I expect he’ll have at least some information I can use. And possibly access to other sources.”

“You do have another way in, you know.”

Tiberius heard the hint of hesitation in Luke’s voice, and his head snapped up. “No,” he said firmly. “I don’t.”

“Dammit, Tiberius. You can use her. Hell, you should use her.”

Her
. Caris.

Within him, the daemon twisted and turned. He’d had millennia to learn how to keep his daemon suppressed. How to control it rather than have it control him. And yet from the moment he’d met Caris, that control was never complete. Every time she’d been in danger, that knowledge had not only ripped him to shreds but had threatened to release the daemon with the same vibrant fury that battered his will whenever he remembered the dark days of abuse at the slave-master Claudius’s hand.

And now that Caris herself was weren, just as Claudius had been …

He clenched his fists, battling the beast back down. Love and hate. Didn’t the poets say they were like Janus? Two sides, but ultimately the same? Certainly in him they were the same at the core—both brought forth the most primitive of emotions, and he could think of neither Caris nor Claudius without falling victim to the thrashing of his daemon.

“No,” he said slowly, forcing himself to be calm. To keep control as he’d learned so well to do. “Absolutely not. I won’t use her.”

“She betrayed you to be with Gunnolf,” Luke said. “She can’t be happy now that he’s out and Lihter’s in. If you bring the right pressure to bear, she could be an asset.”

“She will have no part of this,” Tiberius said, keeping the emotion from his voice even as he kept the memories out of his head. The truth was she hadn’t betrayed him—not as Luke believed, anyway. But now was not the time to tell Luke the truth about Caris’s secrets. As far as Tiberius was concerned, that time would never come.

“She probably wants Lihter removed as much as we
do,” Luke continued. “No matter what she’s done, no matter what’s between you two, she is still a vampire.”

“No,”
Tiberius said, his voice carrying the weight of finality. “She’s taken to a werewolf’s bed. Her loyalties lie elsewhere.”

A muscle in Luke’s jaw twitched, then he nodded, just the briefest dip of his head. “It’s your call. I won’t mention her again.”

“Good,” he said, and he meant it. He appreciated Luke’s silence, but knew that it wouldn’t help. Because no matter how much he wished her away, Caris stayed locked in his thoughts, and he fought the memory of her every single day, mourning what they’d once shared, and knowing that it was lost forever.

And when one was immortal, forever lasted a very long time.

The Alpine bar was dark, so dark that it was hard to see the faces of the men and women huddled around tall tables or leaning against the centuries-old bar, looking for a drink or a good time or both.

Caris stood in deepest shadows, back in the far corner, beyond the dartboard and the karaoke stage where a Teutonic male croaked out the Beatles’ “Help!” in broken English.

He spread his arms wide, gyrated his hips, and mangled the chorus. Caris cringed, and in a moment of rare charity hoped that he hadn’t come to get laid, because no woman in the bar looked drunk enough to take him home. And that said a lot, since most of the people in the small bar smelled of sex and lust and pure, animal heat. So much so, in fact, that the power of their passion seemed to cling to her, making her skin burn and her hunger build.

But she hadn’t come for sex. She’d come for something entirely different.

Caris had come to kill.

Slowly, she scoured the faces of the men in the bar, looking for the one from the picture, the darkness no hindrance to her preternatural vision. He was supposed to be in Zermatt this night, though she didn’t know where. But Zermatt was a small town, and she was thorough, the image of his face from the dossier now burned into her mind.

Until she’d received that information from the investigator she’d hired, she’d never even seen his face. During her captivity he’d taken care to hide his features and mask his scent. When she’d first seen his picture, she was surprised by how tame he looked.

She knew better. According to the dossier, the weren’s name was Cyrus Reinholt. By all accounts he was an average werewolf, but before he’d been bitten, he’d been a scientist in Germany. She remembered the injections, the studious way her captor had recorded her reactions.
Please. Let her have finally found the right one
.

For nineteen years, she’d followed so many leads, only to find that she’d been stalking the wrong prey.

This time, though …

By the gods, this time she had to be right. One more false lead and she feared she would snap. Orion had told her over and over she should simply quit. Pack it in. Throw in the towel and all those other cutesy sayings for giving up, because killing the one who’d done this to her wouldn’t change anything. But she couldn’t. She
wouldn’t
. That would mean that
he
would have won. That he’d taken her perfect life and ripped it into tiny pieces. That he’d turned her into something new. Something reviled. Something toxic.

And that was unacceptable. There was a price for pain.

Tonight, he’d learn just how heavy a price her pain had borne.

One by one, she examined the faces in the bar, ignoring the two blond male vampires hunched in a corner. She wasn’t interested in other vamps. Not tonight.

She let her eyes pass over the females, focusing only on the men. The breadth of their chests. The cut of their
shoulders. Searching for a man with a bulky frame and the same dark hair and thin mustache reflected on the dossier picture.

He wasn’t there
.

Goddamn it all, he wasn’t there.

With a series of curses burning her tongue, she whirled around. Maybe he was in another bar. Maybe he was hiking the damn Matterhorn. Maybe the universe was playing one big nasty trick on her.

Didn’t matter, she thought as a man slipped in front of her, heading for the bar. She knew he’d come to Zermatt. Ultimately she’d find him. Ultimately, she’d—

Tiberius?

It wasn’t him, of course. Not the man she’d once loved with every breath in her body. The man who’d ripped her heart to shreds.

The man in front of her wasn’t Tiberius. But the midnight-black hair and infinite eyes had caught her attention as surely as Tiberius’s had that first night when she’d glimpsed him in her father’s house, a stranger offering his services as a warrior. The resemblance was striking, and for the briefest of moments, her throat tightened and her pulse burned, violent anger warring with the deepest of desire.

“Buy you a drink?” the man in front of her asked, and when he spoke the illusion faded. His was the voice of a man who picked up women in bars. Definitely not Tiberius.

She paused, looked him slowly up and down, then continued toward the door.

He fell in step beside her despite the brush-off. Apparently, he was either stubborn or stupid.

“You’re alone,” he said.

“Your powers of perception are mind-boggling.” She kept on walking.

“A woman like you shouldn’t be alone.”

She stopped, then slowly turned to face him. “And what kind of woman is that?”

“A beautiful one.”

“Trust me,” she said. “It’s a deadly beauty.”

“I know.” He was looking at her hard, and she could smell the truth on him. He knew what she was, and damned if that didn’t excite him. The prospect of blood teased her daemon, the dark malevolence that lived deep inside every vampire, and her hunger grew.

The wolf stirred, too. The secret beast inside her.
He’d
made her this way, and she’d come to kill in payment for his dirty little tricks. For turning her into walking death. An outsider in her own damn world.

For making her a hybrid.

Can’t go there, Caris. Don’t even think it
.

“I want what you can give.” He looked at her with eyes wide and wild, like a junkie staring into a candy jar filled with meth.

“Death?”

“The rush.” His chest rose and fell with his breath, the scent of desire wafting off him. He licked his lips and took a step toward her. “I know what you are,” he said, then tilted his head to the side. “Feed.”

Something raw and angry welled inside her. “You have no idea what I am,” she said. “You don’t have a goddamned clue.”

“You’re a vampire.”

The word hit her with the force of a slap, and she stepped closer, so close she could feel the heat of his excitement
rising from his bone-pale skin. “I’m not,” she said. “Not anymore.”

She looked into those dark eyes and saw the fear growing, a fear that fed and fueled her, that primed her and begged her to take, take,
take
. To get revenge. Against the man she hunted, yes. But more against the man who’d loved her until the day he’d banished her. She wanted to give Tiberius the big Fuck You. And right now … right now it was this guy standing in front of her. This guy, waiting for her to take his blood, his life …

She fought it down, fought it back.

Not now. Not when she was on the hunt.

“Go,” she said, pressing her palm against his chest and pushing him away from her. “Find yourself a less dangerous game to play.”

He went, hurrying back into the shadows of the bar to find another playmate.

She shook her head, sorting her thoughts, making a plan. She’d hit the next bar, then the one after that if she had to. She’d find her quarry. She’d come to this town with a purpose, and she didn’t intend to be distracted. Not even by the goddamned memories of Tiberius.

It took her a while to navigate through the crowd, people crushed together, their hot breath warming the air, the scent of sweating bodies beneath thick sweaters teasing her senses. She paused for a drink at the bar and searched the crowd for her quarry. He wasn’t there, but humanity pressed all around her, and the scent of it both taunted and saddened her. She’d been human once, too, but Tiberius had changed all that. He’d promised her forever and she’d believed him.

She’d been a fool.

She burst through the door, and the cold air stung her cheeks and cooled her thoughts. She started down the street toward the next pub, snow crunching beneath her feet.

A scream ripped through the night as if echoing her own need to rend and tear. She told herself to ignore it—not her problem. But the smell of fear permeated the air. Whatever was happening, it was close. And, dammit all, she was already heading in that direction.

She found them in the alley behind the bar—the two vamps and the idiot patron with Tiberius’s eyes. One of the vamps leaned lazily against the rough-hewn wooden wall while the other held the human in a mockery of a lover’s embrace, his teeth sunk deep into the male’s flesh.

She started to turn away—she wasn’t with the Preternatural Enforcement Coalition. It wasn’t her job to arrest vamps who ran around feeding on humans, even dumbass ones who’d been begging for trouble. Especially not dumbass ones who reminded her of Tiberius. And wasn’t there some sort of sweet justice in seeing the life sucked out of him?

She watched for a second, breathing in the scent of fear, the aroma of death. She watched, and then she cursed.

Goddamn it all
.

Three long strides and she was right in front of them. “Funny,” she said, speaking to the one with his fangs buried in flesh. “He doesn’t look like a licensed faunt.”

“Not your business, little girl,” the one with his mouth free said. “Not unless you’re interested in sharing.”

She faced him, her hand going to her hip, pushing the leather of her coat back, revealing the knife she habitually
wore there. “I don’t think we’ve been introduced,” she said. “I’m Caris.”