Night Whispers: ShadowLands, Book 1 (26 page)

He opened his hand. Inside his palm, looking very small and crushed, were the mangled remains of her earpiece.

So that’s where it had gone.

Sorrow hit her anew at the sight of that last, severed connection to James. She glanced up to find Erik’s hard silver gaze upon her. Most definitely, all the kindness of the night before was gone. “It’s not what you think.”

“A bug. A transponder of some kind?”

She shook her head. “No. I swear. It’s an auditory earpiece. It allowed me to hear what…someone…at Raven was saying. They had left the connection open.”

“This is why you acted so strangely in the car?”

“Yes.”

“This someone…is it this James?”

She blinked at him. “What do you know about James?”

“You called out to him while you were asleep. A great deal.”

“James is…” He was everything. A tide of emotion welled. “He’s my contact at headquarters. Out in Pennsylvania.”

“Your lover?”

“We’ve never even met.”

“But you’d like to.”

“Wouldn’t you like to meet someone you’ve only spoken with remotely?” she asked evasively.

“Perhaps. But I wouldn’t call out the name of a coworker while I was near death.”

His probing gaze was too much to avoid. “Fine! Yes. We have a…a flirtation.”

“Of course you do.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“It’s easy to have a long-distance romance with a man you’ve never met, isn’t it? I bet you think he’s a wonderful man who is worried out of his mind for you. Who thinks of you as often as you think of him.”

Each disdainful word scraped along her soul like he was pricking at an exposed nerve. She was already partially grieving for the man, damn it. Because even if he hadn’t died trying to get to her, even if he found her, she knew a happily ever after wasn’t likely, whether or not she was some hybrid creature.

“You know nothing about him or me. So I’ll thank you to shut your mouth.” She took a step away. The back of her legs hit the couch. “I don’t know what your problem is. I get that you have a chip on your shoulder, and I understand why it’s there. But that’s no reason to take it out on me.”

He pinched her chin between his thumb and forefinger. The move didn’t hurt, but at the same time, she wasn’t getting away unless he wished it. “Is he going to come here?”

“I don’t know,” she answered honestly.

His face was impassive, but if she had wanted to provoke some emotion in him, she knew she had managed it. The anger pulsed off him. “What did you hear him say through this device?”

Like she’d tell him that. She wasn’t
exactly
scared of her old friend right now, but she’d never been a stupid person.

“I—”

His nostrils flared. “Shh.”

She raised an eyebrow at him. “You probably don’t remember how much I hate being shushed.”

He grabbed her by the arm and pivoted, facing the door, his body like an animal that had caught scent of prey. “You lying bitch. Someone’s here. I can smell them.”

Having learned his lesson at the business end of Ben’s shotgun, this time when James came across the isolated farmhouse, he armed himself before stopping the car well away from the home. He opened his car door, if not fearlessly, at least without hesitation now. Ben had done him a favor busting out his window, and Jules’s paper trail had finished the job. The feel of air on his skin wasn’t quite so alien anymore.

Setting out on foot, he tried to be as quiet as possible as he moved across the overgrown grassy field. The sun was hidden behind clouds, giving him some extra cover.

He crouched down in the grass and peered at the house. All of the curtains were closed tight except one in a downstairs window. No lights shone from that window, though he supposed that meant little.

He knew he could very well be wasting his time and facing the ire of yet another hermit homeowner. The last piece of torn-up book he’d found had been well over four miles from here. Still, the back of his neck was tingling like it used to when he received that last crucial piece of intel, solving the puzzle. He rose from his crouch but remained hunched, his hand sweating around the gun.

He moved through the brush until he could get to the open yard of the home itself. What he saw thrilled him. There, under the slight gap between the curtains of one of the windows, was the glow of light. A lantern or a candle, perhaps.

Calm down. It could be someone other than Jules.

There were, after all, so many variables that he hadn’t been able to account for. So many alternate situations which could have cropped up, leading Jules down a different road or path. So he really shouldn’t be optimistic.

He couldn’t quite quell the spurt of hope as he crept to the front door. He was debating between knocking or trying the handle when the door exploded open, slamming into his face.

The blow caught him off guard, and he staggered backward. “Wait,” he gasped, before the weight of a freight train pushed into him.

A strong hand grasped his wrist and slammed his gun hand down. His fingers screamed at him to loosen around the metal, but he wasn’t about to give up his sole advantage. Adrenaline coursed through him, and he fell back on instinct and basic hand-to-hand combat.

His formal life-long training in karate? Useless. This called for the good old street fighting he’d picked up from the simulations he’d run alongside his agents. Here was his chance to show what he’d learned. His brain raced through the various positions and moves.

He was in an unfortunate position on his back, which limited his ability to fight. There were only a certain number of things he could do.

Objective: Until he figured out who this person was, he only wanted to disarm, not seriously injure.

He raised his head off the ground and slammed it into the face above him. The other man reeled, more surprised than hurt. James took advantage of the space, planted one foot on the guy’s hip, wiggled back and shoved his knee up, catching the man in his groin.

His naked groin.

James had never been kicked in the nuts, but he imagined it was doubly painful when there were no layers of clothes to separate the flesh from impact. The man recoiled and rolled away, clutching his abused privates.

Wasting no time, James got to his feet and pointed the gun in his numb hand at the guy curled into a ball in the dirt. The soft blue of the dawn sky gave him enough light to see that the blond man was seriously jacked. And completely nude, with the exception of a dull, primitive-looking collar around his neck.

The guy recovered quickly. He dropped his hands away from his privates and rolled to sit on his ass. His head came up, and James was fixed with a pair of light, light eyes.

Too light. And that hair wasn’t blond, it was white.
Shadow.

Yet the man’s skin was too dark for that, wasn’t it?

James’s finger tightened on the trigger. His common sense told him to pull it, yet the coloring was odd enough that he had to hesitate.

“Drop the gun. Or I’ll shoot.”

Another person. How could he have turned his back on the house—?

The voice penetrated his brain, and he froze. That voice. The husky, feminine voice that he heard even in his dreams. The voice that normally came through complex machinery and not through standard audio waves.

“Jules,” he breathed.

There was silence behind him, and then finally a thin whisper of sound, like a small sob. “James?”

He knew he shouldn’t turn away from the guy on the ground, but he couldn’t stop from craning his neck around to find the woman standing in the shadows of the porch. Her whiskey-colored eyes met his.

If a train had rammed into his stomach, he wouldn’t feel more poleaxed. He’d been waiting for this moment, not just for a couple of days or a couple of years, but for his whole entire life. He’d been lost in the dark until now.

Those pretty eyes narrowed and shifted past him, and the aim of her gun changed. “Don’t you take another step closer,
cuate
. This one’s mine.”

He glanced back to the man to find him on his feet, seemingly recovered. James knew he should be wildly intimidated, since the stranger looked large enough to break him in two, but his mind still couldn’t quite wrap around the fact that Jules had called him hers.

The man with the strange coloring sneered at him but spoke to Jules. “I’ll be damned if I’m going to get locked up again, woman. I’ll kill him first. Let his death be on your conscience.”

James cocked his head. The Shadow who was not a Shadow could talk. Of course he could. “I don’t want you, locked up or otherwise. I came for her.”

“Is that right?”

“That’s right.”

“Lay one hand on him and I’ll make you regret it. You said you owed a debt to me. I’m collecting,” Jules said.

“You already collected when I saved your life.”

“I feel remarkably out of the loop here. Who
is
this freak?” James asked, impatience brimming. The guy didn’t act like her jailor or her kidnapper, but there was enough tension between them that he knew they weren’t willing cohorts in this plan to run off to Saskatchewan.

Damn it, this was not how he’d pictured events unfolding. The man was interfering with his reunion with Jules. They were supposed to be running slow motion into each other’s arms right now. There was even a field right over there that would be perfect for slow-motion-run purposes.

Jules and the stranger were locked in a staring contest, which the other man broke with a sound of disgust. “Yes, Jules. You can explain all about
the freak
.” His lips twisted. “And perhaps you might get around to telling him about me too.”

Her lips firmed. “Go inside, or I swear to God I will shoot you just to shut you up.”

“After all you did to save my life? I’m hurt, Jules.”

The sharp crack of the gun echoed in the clearing. The three of them stared at the depression the bullet had made in the ground not one inch from the stranger’s naked foot.

Jules and the other man looked at him and his smoking handgun. “You will listen to her,” James said softly.

“Fast draw.” The stranger bit off the words.

“My family was career military. I know how to handle a gun.”

“I could disarm you in a minute, fool,” the man seethed.

“And I would drop you in the next,” Jules responded calmly.

He knew there were more important undercurrents going on here, but it was kind of sexy how he and Jules were working together. The guns increased the sexiness angle, of course.

The freak growled. “Fine. Whatever.” He stalked past James. More than anything, James didn’t want to look into those pitiless, pigmentless eyes, but since his manhood was at stake, he wouldn’t be the one to break the stare. “Debt or no debt to your woman…I can and will destroy you should you even look at me cross-eyed.”

The daredevil inside of him, the one that had sustained him on a perilous trek across two countries, urged him to cross his eyes at the man. But something, perhaps the reality that the guy’s biceps were about as thick as James’s neck, kept him from doing something so foolish.

He didn’t like that the dangerous creature walked so close to Jules in order to go inside. His hand tightened on his gun. “Jules. Step away from him.”

“It’s okay,” she said, her voice tired. “I know he can be as annoying as heck, but he’s not the bad guy.”

His ego flinched from the fact that she was defending another man from him, but he lowered the gun. The man went inside and closed the door.

Silence dropped between them. She was studying him. He wanted to flinch away, to hide, but he couldn’t. There was no computer to crouch behind, no surveillance equipment to creep around with, no bunker to go bury himself in.

It took effort to tear his gaze away from her face and catalog the rest of her. Her body was as lithe and athletic as he’d imagined. She was wearing clothes that were a little incongruous for the weather, but he didn’t mind when he could see her black bra and tanned skin playing peekaboo with her top. Breasts were so damned delightfully distracting.

Her hair was funky, streaked light blonde. He hadn’t realized she’d done that, but he saw her reflection so rarely, that was no surprise. It suited her.

They were both still holding their guns. Mumbling an apology, he thumbed the safety on and tucked the weapon inside the waistband of his pants. An odd smile crossed her lips, and she did the same with hers.

He cleared his throat. Why did speaking seem so awkward now? They’d been talking to each other for the better part of a year. “Should we go inside as well?”

He realized with a sort of stunned amazement that he wanted to go inside not because he was panicked over the fact that he was standing vulnerable in the open air, but because he wanted Jules to be able to sit down and be comfortable.

There was no denying that he was uneasy, but he wasn’t freezing up or having a panic attack. He hadn’t really even done that since the Shadow had attacked him. Was it a painful sort of aversion therapy he’d undergone?