Rhyannon Byrd - Primal Instinct 04 (8 page)

Clearing his throat, Kierland slid the vamp a grim
look of regret. “The nesting grounds had slipped my mind.”

“Yeah, well, the locations of those nesting grounds
were given to the Collective by Ross Westmore.” The man’s hatred and rage were
unmistakable in the huskily spoken words, though his deep voice remained eerily
quiet. “You know that as well as I.”

And the Deschanel obviously wanted revenge, he
thought, reflecting that this could easily get ugly. Not to mention complicated
as hell. “So because of the nesting grounds, you want to join forces with us?”

“We’re not asking to become a part of the party.” The
vampire’s dry tone suggested that he knew damn well Kierland would never agree
to work with the Deschanel. “But we’re willing to help you learn more about the
things you don’t know,” he offered suggestively. “Willing to get you
information that you’re going to need.”

Certain there had to be a catch, he asked, “And just
what would you want in return?”

“That brings me to my second purpose.” With his hands
still buried in his pockets, Gideon straightened away from the street sign and
stepped forward, narrowing the space between them to no more than a few feet.
“If you find Westmore before we do, we want him.”

“We?” Kierland asked, acutely aware of his beast’s
repulsion at having the vamp so near. “You mean the Deschanel?”

Gideon shook his head. “This is a personal matter for
my family, considering our positions and the fact that we had cousins who died
in the massacre. My brother and I intend to deal with Westmore alone.”

Fury scraped down Kierland’s nerve endings like a
blade, and it was a physical effort to keep his fangs from descending. Taking
an aggressive step forward, he ignored the wolf’s vicious snarls vibrating
inside his skull and got right in Gideon’s face, going nose to nose with him.
“You’ve got a lot of balls,” he growled, longing to throw the first punch,
“thinking I’d agree to anything that involves Ashe.”

Granger’s lips twitched with bitter humor. “You’re not
the first man who’s accused me of that, but I’m sure as hell not going to show
them to you, Lycan. And yeah, I think you’ll cooperate. You need this
information too badly.”

“I don’t need anything that badly,” Kierland drawled
with a mean smile. “And your brother can go screw himself for all I care.”

The vampire’s eyes narrowed, until nothing but a thin
slice of gray burned through the dark veil of his lashes. “Regardless of how
you feel about Ashe, you know the code. It’s our right to destroy the ones who
have turned against us. We intend to keep searching for Westmore, doing
everything we can to find him. But we want this deal, in the event that you get
to him first.”

For a moment Kierland thought his hatred would
actually get the better of him, the wolf punching against his insides, eager to
act on the rage that continued to seethe beneath his surface. The only thing
that held him back was the vampire’s eyes. The gray was darkening, proof that
Gideon hadn’t fed before approaching him. In the world of the Deschanel, that
was a sign that he’d come in peace, and not aggression. The vamp would still be
capable of giving Kierland a hell of a fight, but he’d purposely constrained
his strength as a show of good faith—one that Kierland couldn’t ignore, no
matter how badly he wanted to.

Taking a deep breath, he retreated back a step,
needing to put a little breathing room between them as he struggled for
control. “You know, word on the street has it that the Deschanel treat the
Kraven like slaves,” he pointed out with thick sarcasm. “When you look at it
like that, you can hardly blame them for revolting.”

“I didn’t say that their lot in life was fair,” Gideon
muttered, his rough tone cut with shades of anger and frustration. “But as
Förmyndares, my brother and I have a duty to protect the interests of the
Northern clans.”

Though he wanted to argue the point, Kierland knew the
bastard was right. It was the duty of the Deschanel Förmyndares, or Protectors,
to destroy any threats to the vampire clans. And considering how much he knew
about the Deschanel, Westmore was definitely a threat. “You still haven’t told
me what you have to offer,” he muttered before easing back another step,
needing to put a little more distance between them if he wanted to keep the
wolf from taking over and going for the vamp’s throat. “This information you
think I need so badly. What is it?”

“The Markers,” Gideon replied, his pale eyes holding
Kierland’s hostile stare. “There are things you don’t know about them. In
truth, they’re not all that they seem.”

“Meaning?”

A low, bitter laugh rumbled up from the vampire’s
chest, his expression shadowed by something ugly and dark. “Meaning that no
good deed in this world goes unpunished, Lycan. Or haven’t you learned that by
now?”

A scowl pulled Kierland’s features tight. “And just
what the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means that your precious Dark Markers are far from
perfect. The Deschanel Elders believe that in order to pour the necessary power
into those little bits of metal, the Consortium had to travel into places that
you righteous bastards would never think of going. They had to meddle with
things that were better left alone.” Taking his right hand from his pocket,
Gideon rubbed his fingers against the shadow of bristle that roughened his jaw.
“In short,” he rasped, “they had to go begging to the darkness.”

“The darkness,” Kierland echoed, noticing that from
where he stood, only half of Gideon’s face was actually illuminated by the
moonlight, while the other half remained shrouded in the shadows. Darkness and
light. Although duality was a common feature among many of the clans, the trait
was especially strong within the Deschanel, whose very natures were a
dichotomy. A trait that made them complex friends…and dangerous enemies. “Are
you actually going to stand there and tell me that they used dark magic to make
the Markers?”

Gideon shrugged, the casual gesture pulling the black
silk of his shirt tight across his muscular chest. “It’s all about compromise,”
he murmured. “Sometimes if you want something badly enough, you have to lower
your morals to get it.”

“They wouldn’t have,” Kierland argued in a low voice,
the horrific idea burning its way through his brain like acid.

“Oh, but they would.” Gideon’s mouth twisted into a
wry shape that didn’t quite make its way into a smile. “And they did.”

“If you expect me to believe that, then you’re going
to have to show me proof, Granger.”

“I have a feeling you’re going to have your proof soon
enough,” the Deschanel told him as he stepped back, retreating once more into
the thick shadows that blanketed the far side of the street. “Something is
coming, Lycan. Something that has the Deschanel Elders worried, and the
whispers are beginning to spread like wildfire. It won’t be pleasant, but I’m
willing to get you the answers you need, in exchange for Westmore.”

“What do you mean something’s coming?” he snarled.
“The Casus are already here.”

“Remember the murdered Watchman, Scott. The Casus
aren’t the only evil that wants a piece of this world. Not by a long shot. And
if you want to survive,” Gideon drawled from the murky shadows, the darkness
swallowing his form like an eager, hungry mouth, “you just might have to sell a
bit of your lily-white soul to make it happen.”

Kentucky, near the Ohio state line

THERE WERE TIMES when “hell on earth” wasn’t simply an
expression. Times when a man created his own misery in this world, simply
because of the decisions he made. Decisions that led to circumstances that were
not only torture, but a painful, living extension of his nightmares.

Kierland had given Aiden a book about it once, but
then that was Kierland Scott for you. The unofficial leader of their Watchmen
unit was always trying to help the others through the nasty minefields of their
emotional issues, without ever tackling his own. Personally, Aiden thought it
was an “avoid and deflect” instinct, but Kierland had just told him off when
he’d offered the advice.

The Lycanthrope liked to dish it out. He just didn’t
like to take it. Still, Aiden had read the book and found a certain element of
truth to it. For the moment, his own personal hell was being stuck inside a car
with a human female who sorely tested his control and an adorable child the
monsters wanted to get their claws into. He could have passed her off to Kellan
and Noah, removing himself from the situation, but he hadn’t. No, he’d chosen
this version of hell, and now he was just going to have to deal with the
consequences.

Of course, Molly was to blame, as well. He’d bloody
well known that having a woman for a friend was going to be trouble, and now
look at him.

Friendship was something he never offered to women,
for the sole reason that friendship gave them ideas. The kind that could
seriously screw with a bachelor’s peace of mind—and ones that a man like Aiden
had neither the desire nor the intent to ever fulfill. That alone was reason
enough to keep his relationships simple and to the point. The point being that
he needed women for physical release, but had little use for them beyond sex.
While he might leave them humming with pleasure, it was a God-given fact that
he always left them.

But it wasn’t just the ones that Aiden got hot and
sweaty with who could turn into trouble. He was fast discovering that having a
simple, platonic relationship with a woman created its own set of issues. And
when you made that woman a human female like Molly, who happened to possess the
ability to talk to ghosts, the problems coalesced into one huge, irritating
pain in the ass.

Case in point: his current situation. Aiden had never
so much as even lip-locked with the pretty little blonde who was set to marry
Ian Buchanan, a man Aiden now considered a friend as well as a colleague, and
yet here he was, simply because Molly had called and asked him to find Olivia
Harcourt. Of course, she’d been backed up by Hope Summers, her soon-to-be
sister-in-law. The bloody women had finagled their way into Shrader’s heart and
he’d somehow found himself becoming “friends” with them. It was enough to make
a hardcore son of a bitch’s stomach turn.

And Molly had had no qualms about sending “her buddy
Shrader” on her quest.

Frustration rode him hard, and he could feel the same
sizzling emotion vibrating off Olivia as her car ate up miles of highway. Now
that he was driving and she’d had time to sit and think about everything that
had happened, he was sure she’d put together a long list of questions for him about
her stepsisters, but they could hardly have that conversation now, while Jamie
was in the backseat, not quite asleep yet. Needing something to drown out the
buzz of lust and restlessness in his brain, he finally reached down and turned
on her radio. The latest Kings of Leon began playing from the CD player, and he
smiled. “At least you have better taste in music than you do in cars,” he
drawled.

As she looked toward him in the shadowed interior,
Aiden could feel the heat from her gaze touching quietly upon the sharp angles
of his profile. It swept across the high slash of his right cheekbone, skimming
down the surprisingly straight line of his nose—considering how many times it’d
been broken—until it settled warmly against the corner of his mouth. His beast
reacted to the visual caress with an impatient stretch, as if to remind him of
its hungers. Not that he was in any danger of forgetting them.

“There’s nothing wrong with my car,” she finally
replied, the slight huskiness of her words settling like a ball of fire in the
pit of his stomach, the heat spreading out to his extremities, burning beneath
his skin. Even his goddamn fingers and toes were prickling.

Forcing himself to focus on her words, and not the
million and one other things he wanted to be doing to her at that moment, Aiden
bit down hard on the inside of his cheek until the pain helped him calm down a
little. “Yeah?” he managed to snort after a moment. “Doesn’t seem to be much
right with it, either.”

“Did I momentarily space out and miss something?
Because I don’t recall asking for your opinion on the subject.”

He whistled softly under his breath before flashing
her a cocky smile. “You’re quite the puzzle, aren’t you?”

She appeared baffled by the question. “Is that
supposed to make sense to me?”

He shrugged, flicking the windshield wipers on low as
an easy rain began beading against the glass. “Just that you’re not easy to
peg. To figure out. I mean, you’ve gone from being scared to death of me tonight
to mouthing off like a little hellion. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t enjoying
it. It’s somehow oddly refreshing.”

“Glad to be so entertaining.” Her tone was dry, her
posture tense as she crossed her arms over the heavy swell of her chest.

“Well, you’ll fit in great back at Ravenswing. Molly
and Hope are gonna love you. Hell, they’ll probably even ask you to join their
little human sisterhood.”

“And who are Molly and Hope?” The sudden, unmistakable
edge to her words had him smiling again. “Your girlfriends?”

Aiden gave another low whistle, strangely enjoying
their easy banter. “You think I’ve got two women living under the same roof?
Impressive.”