On the Prowl (29 page)

He shrieked and struck out even as he released her. The blow caught her on the side of the head, stunning her, and Saskia collapsed to the floor like a bag of bones.

Everything seemed to happen at once.

She heard her mate roar until it felt as if the very stones of the floor and walls vibrated with his fury. Several people shouted. Chairs crashed to the floor. Doors slammed against walls as security forces from the Silverback Clan rushed into the room from the hall outside and Rafe sprang out of concealment from his hiding spot in the service hall.

A woman screamed, and Saskia recognized the voice as her mother’s. Saskia tried to raise her head, but her muscles wouldn’t cooperate. She was still stunned.

Large hands grasped Saskia under the arms and dragged her across the floor away from the melee. She was aware of a large presence crouched beside her and her senses told her it wasn’t her mate, but her brain couldn’t quite function well enough to identify who it was. She lay in a daze for several more moments before the world began to fall back into place and she tried to sit up. The same hands that had dragged her to safety helped her up and then propped her back against the wall.

Graham Winters frowned down at her and held up a hand. “How many fingers am I holding up?”

She blinked. “Two.”

He grunted and shifted, placing himself slightly in front of her so that anyone approaching would have to go through him. No one approached.

The fighting was over.

Saskia tried to make out what had happened, but overturned furniture blocked her view of some of the room. The Council members had all been rushed outside by the Lupine guards, though she could see the brownie and the shifter craning their necks to look inside.

In the corner between the sideboard and the hearth, her mother crouched on the floor weeping while her husband gazed dully into the flames. Dmitri and a member of the Lupine pack stood in front of them, clearly on guard.

The sight that shook Saskia, though, played out in the middle of the floor in front of the fire, where the Council tables had been shoved away and chairs flung to the walls.

Stefan Preda lay on his back on the cold stone, bloody but defiant. The old man’s face bore three sharp grooves where Saskia’s claws had caught his flesh, but already the blood had slowed to a trickle and the wounds had begun to draw together. Shifters were hard to kill. Stefan stared up at the shape above him and hissed and spat in furious madness.

Nic crouched over his father in full tiger form, over seven hundred pounds of muscle and teeth and claws. His green eyes looked hard and vicious, and he had one huge paw pressed against the older man’s chest, his claws flexing rhythmically as if testing the resilience of the flesh beneath them.

Saskia gave a mewl of distress and tried to rise, to go to Nic, but Graham stopped her with a growl and a firm shove. That was all it took to send her slumping back to the floor. Her eyes remained on the scene before the fire, though, and fear and pain warred in her belly. Fear of what might happen and pain for the decision her mate tried to make.

Graham shifted, giving Saskia a more complete view of the hearth, and she saw that Rafe crouched there, too, facing Nic over his father’s body. The head of the Council had retained his human form, but he watched the Tiguri with the golden eyes of a predator.

“Think before you act, my friend,” Rafe spoke, his quiet voice seeming loud in the calm that followed the storm. “Actions are not like words; they can never be taken back.”

Nicolas snarled.

“I understand your fury,” the Felix continued. “Believe me, I feel the burn of it, too. Your father tried to take my life. The beast in me says that can only be avenged by taking his. And the man in me is furious that I was nearly bested by an old cat twice my age. But I can decide not to be controlled by my beast. I can make the decision to let him live and continue to suffer the consequences of his actions.”

A half roar, muted but angry, filled the air. The tiger looked at his sire, then lifted his head and looked across the room to his mate. Saskia stared back, trying to pour love and comfort and reassurance across the room.

The tiger snarled again and bared his fangs at the man under his paw.

“I know,” Rafe spoke again. He didn’t move, but he kept talking to the tiger, searching for a connection with the man within. “This man harmed your mate. I would want to kill him, too, if he’d laid a hand on mine. It doubles the weight of his betrayal, that he tried to use you for his own ends and that when his plans began to crumble he raised a hand against your woman even as he hid behind her. But that doesn’t make him worthy of your fury. It makes him worthy of your contempt.”

Saskia silently urged the Felix to keep talking. He seemed to understand the thoughts going through Nic’s only partially human mind, but he kept forcing the Tiguri to cling to that human reason. She prayed Rafe’s strategy would work, because she didn’t know if her mate could live with himself if he killed his own father.

“Nicolas, look at your mate,” Rafe urged, nodding his head at where Saskia sat, leaning against the rough stone wall. “She is here and she is healthy. She doesn’t need to be avenged; she needs you.”

God, yes. The man was absolutely right.

Slowly, Nic lifted his paw from his father’s chest. Shifting his weight, he sat back on his haunches and stared down at the seething old man. At a nod from Rafe, three more Lupines stepped into the room to surround Stefan and ensure he made no further attempts to escape.

With fluid grace, the tiger pushed to his feet and wove between the legs of the werewolves to pad across the floor to his mate. Graham stepped aside as he approached, giving the couple room.

Saskia held her breath as Nicolas stopped just a few inches away and watched her with those fathomless green eyes. Hesitant, she waited until he lowered his head and chuffed, leaning forward to nuzzle her chest.

Crying softly, she wrapped her arms around his massive head, buried her face in his thick fur, and wept. After a second, she felt human arms slip around her and the fur beneath her cheek became smooth, bare skin. She only held on tighter.

“God, I love you, Nicolas. I love you so much,” she gasped against his skin, and felt his embrace tighten.

“I love you, too, Sassy girl,” he murmured against her hair. “I love you, too.”

Gently Nicolas scooped his mate into his arms and began to carry her toward the door, oblivious to his nudity.

“What a pitiful display.”

The bitter tones of Stefan’s pronouncement echoed under the vaulted ceiling and earned a warning growl from several throats, but the old man was too caught up in his bitterness to care.

“It’s too bad I didn’t build my plan around killing you myself,” he spat. “Now I have to go to my grave knowing my own son turned out to be such a disappointment to me.”

Nicolas never paused, and he never looked back.

“No, you don’t,” he said as the crowd at the door parted before him. “I don’t have a father.”

Epilogue

The mess turned out to be more easily cleaned up than anyone had suspected.

With Nic’s blessing, Dmitri contacted the Tiguri
theri
in Europe to discuss the situation. Acting as their leader and representative, Milan Voros pronounced judgment over the Arcoses. While Gregor and Victoria had acted more as pawns in Stefan’s master plan than as true co-conspirators, they could not be allowed to benefit from their crimes, nor could they go unpunished. Accordingly, the Arcos clan was stripped of its identity as an independent streak and the couple was given provisional membership in the Voros clan. Milan would personally oversee their behavior, which would not be difficult, as they had been assigned to live in a small farmhouse on the
ther
’s vast estate near the border between Russia and Georgia.

Feeling magnanimous after all of that, Voros also agreed to allow the Others to assist in arranging for the punishment of Stefan Preda. Dmitri himself made a few phone calls and arranged for the man to be incarcerated for the remainder of his life in an inescapable fortress prison designed and most often used for vampires convicted of unforgivable crimes.

Nicolas was not told of the prison’s location, and he did not care. As far as he was concerned, his family, and his new streak, consisted of him, his wife, and any cubs they might conceive together. He considered that more than enough to make him happy.

It did not make him quite as happy to have to offer his thanks to not only the resourceful vampire but also the head of the Council of Others and the Alpha of the Silverback Clan. With only a slight prod from his mate, he did it anyway. After all, De Santos had kept him from committing an act that might have changed him forever, and Winters had protected Nic’s mate when he had been unable to do it himself. Maybe they had a few redeeming features between them.

He did, however take great delight in vocally turning down Rafe’s offer of a seat on the Council of Others. As Nic told the Felix, he’d rather serve on the Council of Digging Out His Own Eyeballs with a Rusty Spoon. Rafe had decided not to press the issue. Especially not when Nic had offered him another option. Nic still refused to serve on the Council, but he was happy to offer his recommendation for another Tiguri to fill the position. Saskia, after all, made a much better politician than he ever would.

She, after all, had been the one to fully grasp the motives behind his father’s plan, to see the implications of the attacks, the scheming, and the attempted murder. She had realized what Stefan was after with a clarity Nic didn’t think he himself would ever have achieved on his own. Saskia understood people, she understood what drove them and consequently what could drive them over the edge. What better qualifications for a seat on the Council of Others could a tiger have?

Of course, Nic had felt compelled to warn the werejaguar that if the other man so much as looked at Nic’s mate the wrong way—meaning other than straight in the eye and for more than any three consecutive seconds—the Tiguri would be happy to turn him into cat chow. Saskia deserved recognition for her unique talents, but that didn’t make her any less Nic’s mate, and he was one Tiguri who had finished catting around. Permanently.

And so, less than a week after the execution of the plan, Nic found himself waking up in his own bed to the very pleasant memory of his mate’s last official night in heat. At this point, her ovulation window had closed and it would be at least another month before Nicolas was able to stimulate her into another cycle.

He sighed. He supposed he’d just have to be patient, although a few weeks of only having sex twice a day might turn into a nice change of pace.

Grinning to himself, Nic opened his eyes and discovered his bed was empty. For a change, Saskia had managed to wake before him and sneak out of the bedroom without disturbing him. Or maybe she saw it as making her escape. With her heat over, she might be feeling more than a little relief at the idea of taking a short break from the sexual marathon they’d been running recently.

He swung out of bed all but whistling a jaunty tune. Tugging a pair of sweatpants out of his closet, he pulled them on for the sake of decency before following his nose into the kitchen.

Actually, it was more so that his morning erection wouldn’t send his mate running for the hills. There were some things over which a man had very little control.

He found Saskia in front of the stove with a bright red apron tied around her waist. Nic sighed in disappointment that it wasn’t the only thing she wore. So much for his masculine fantasies. Under the apron, he spied a pair of crisp cotton pajamas in virginal white. At least she hadn’t tried to wear them to bed, he consoled himself.

His mate turned when she saw him and waved at him with an upraised spatula. “About time you got up, lazybones. Breakfast is almost ready.”

He grinned. “It wasn’t my fault. I needed my rest. Some insatiable woman kept me up all night attending to her lustful needs. I’m exhausted.”

“That’s funny.” She winked at him. “I woke up feeling positively energized. I could run a marathon. But I decided to make pancakes instead. I hope you’re hungry.”

“Starved. I worked up one hell of an appetite.”

She blushed, and he laughed. He loved that he could do that to her so easily.

He stepped up behind her and wrapped his arms around her waist, snuggling her back against his chest. Dipping his face to her shoulder, he buried his nose against her neck and inhaled deeply.

“Mm, strawberry jam,” he murmured appreciatively. “How did you know I liked that on my pancakes? Smells fresh, too. Did you run out to the farmer’s market before you started cooking?”

Saskia laughed and craned her head to give him a look like he was crazy. “What on earth are you talking about? We don’t even have any strawberry jam. We’ll eat our pancakes with maple syrup like civilized people.”

Nic made a face to show his disappointment, and again the scent of fresh strawberry jam drifted up to him. His eyes ran over his mate’s slender form from the tips of her toes to the top of her strawberry blonde head.

He froze.

Strawberries.

His eyes widened, and his gaze shot to hers. His mouth opened, then closed, then opened again. Saskia stared at him for a moment, clearly puzzled. Then she read something in his expression and recognition dawned.

Strawberry tiger. Ripe,
fertile
strawberry tiger.

The grin that widened his mouth started at his toes and lit up half the city by the time it settled on his face. Reaching out, he placed a hand over his mate’s still-flat belly and purred.

He loved strawberries.

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