Tempting the Enemy (15 page)

It was the Heat, she concluded. It was making him do and say things he normally wouldn’t. The bitter truth was, if she didn’t have pheromones attacking his senses from all sides, he’d never have considered looking at her as anything but an enemy. And it was bitter, she decided, tugging at her glove, eyeing the blue signatures next to her. Because she liked Rysen. She liked the look and the feel of him. The strength of him. She liked his rusty-sounding laughter and his grudging acquiescence. She could do without his demanding, but she melted over and over again at his unexpected gentleness. And his passion…

Jade bit back a sigh, her body tightening in memory.

She could still taste him, feel his tongue on her breasts.

The imprint of his touch on her back, on her hips as he Dee Tenorio

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guided her desperate movements into a rolling glide of pure pleasure.

A deep growl sounded too close to be ten feet away.

Jerk
. But she couldn’t let him interfere with her thoughts right now. She needed to feel the signature.

Unlike human ones, shifter and Sibile signatures had to be sampled to grasp the emotion. Every hundred yards or so, she’d let her fingers dip through the lingering streaks. The boy’s signature was easiest to read. Happiness, excitement, an underlying thread of regret and sadness.

Loss. All his emotions were pure and clear. The girl, though, wasn’t so easy.

Jade slipped her hand into the color, concentrating on the feelings she found. They were blurred—protectiveness and weariness. Guilt and determination, followed by a growing sense of pride that she’d brought him so far, was so close to safety. Love, though, was strongest. She loved the boy, almost as much as her heart hurt for her family.

Her…murdered family.

Jade almost pulled away at that feeling, knowing it far too well. But right about then she found it. Fea—

“I’m telling you, I can smell him.” Pale—no,
Rysen
—had made up the distance between them in less than a heartbeat. Before she could argue, he’d positioned her behind him, blocking her sight of the trees. “He was here.”

Pushing him wouldn’t get her anywhere, so she did her best to ignore him and the streak of electric blue wrapping around her as if it could protect her all by itself.

She flashed on the memory of the color ripping the oily black signature out of her arm. All right, maybe it could. But
how
it could didn’t make sense. How did his color have abilities when everyone else, even the two 128

Tempting the Enemy

Wolves she was tracking now, did nothing but leave an emotional recording for her to find? If it were a shifter skill, why wasn’t this girl’s signature around the boy’s?

Was the killer a shifter of some kind, given the way his color had attacked? Something she’d never seen before, like Aaron? What did it mean?

Jade wasn’t going to find out right now. She had to concentrate on what she had in front of her. “The female sensed something here. Apprehension. Awareness of eyes on her. Following her.” Jade moved forward, following the signature. Rysen let her go, his color strangely not interfering as she read the girl. With every step, the sensory increased. Skittishness. Fear. Flight. She needed to run. No…she needed to
fly
.
It’s coming, it’s coming,
it’s—

“Jade.”

She whipped around in a semi-circle, the sensation of the signature blinking away, her arm caught by Rysen’s big hand around her biceps.

“What the hell are you doing?” he demanded, eyeing the tree line for any trace of threat.

A
different
set of trees.

She blinked, trying to clear her mind of the girl’s emotions. The strength of the fear had been enough to take control. She realized that the rough breathing she could hear was her own, the icy air burning a trail down to her lungs. What had she been doing?

Running. The clear memory filtered into Jade’s mind. With the boy on her back, desperate to avoid whatever was hunting her. And Jade knew she’d have followed through with the rest of the girl’s fate if he hadn’t caught her and yanked her free from the signature.

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She hadn’t seen the change coming, the strengthening of feeling. It had been low level, but not the full-on stream of consciousness capable of stealing Jade’s sense of self. He’d attacked in the space of a heartbeat, and only the girl’s sense of self-preservation, of protectiveness, had given her time to run.

“She knew he was coming.” Jade looked up at Rysen’s scowl, wishing it had anything to do with actual concern on his part. “She felt him watching her.”

“Watching from where?” He didn’t reach out to touch her again, but he didn’t have to, not with that tone of pure demand. Verda-Rouge would have been proud.

Jade looked around, but the darkness among the trees was the same along the rock of the mountain across the street. “I don’t know. I can’t see him anywhere.” But he was there. He had to be. She glanced again at the man who disturbed her as much as he satisfied her. Whether she liked it or not, she needed him. “Stay close.”

He stepped as close as he could, his huge form dwarfing her. His hands settled on her hips, reminding her too much of their time in the cabin, but since he said nothing, she only bit her lip and relaxed beneath the calming hold of his color.

It brightened, coating her down to her fingertips. It took work not to sigh, contented by the gentle contact. As if it were trying to soothe her.

She gave her head a shake. Looking for the Woodsman was not a time to be soothed. Hands extended, his light creating a glowing sphere around her, she searched the trees and the shadowy spaces behind them.

No trace of the blackness. Not until she turned and saw the ribbon of ink across the road.

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The bastard, to quote the man at her back, had been there all along.

In motion, the Woodsman’s mark wasn’t a cloudy streak like most signatures. Just as opaque as before, it looked more like a trail of still-wet paint arcing from point to point. From the side, it made little more than a line curving through the air, but change the angle…

She crossed the silent road, standing beneath the signature with a sick kind of awe. Wider than her own armspan, it looked like a slice in the fabric of reality, floating there with a strange grace. Visually following it backward, she realized that her lack of thoroughness was about to cost them.

“He’d been following them for a while. Halfway down the hillside.”

“Before where you started running?”

She nodded, glaring at the darkness in front of her.

She’d been lax, tired and moody, missing cues in the signal because she’d been too busy thinking about Rysen.

Thinking about herself.

“Take me there.”

Tightening her lips at the command, she tamped down her anger and led the way back down the hill. It didn’t take long, but Rysen wasn’t any happier when she showed him the spot.

“How could he have started following them here?

There’s no access to this road except at the bottom of the hill.” He looked up the tree, frowning. “You said the signature was flying up the hill. So you mean he flew
down
here, right? Maybe he’s a shifter?”

“I don’t know. But there’s no trace of him or anyone other than the two Wolves on the other side of the road.

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And
he
starts
here
. There’s nothing that says this was a landing. He just appears.” Behind a tree. The signal rooted almost from the ground before soaring outward. It remained parallel to the road, parallel to the Wolves.

Keeping pace with them, if the girl’s senses were to be believed. But the girl had been afraid because she couldn’t see him. Didn’t know what stalked her. How? As a Wolf, she should have been able to scent her assailant.

Why hadn’t she been able to figure out where he was?

If Jade didn’t already know there were no answers to be found in the signature, she’d be tempted to touch it again.

“Don’t even think about it.”

She turned narrowed eyes on her keeper. “I’m not an idiot, Detective. I learn from my mistakes.” Most of the time. Frustratingly, she couldn’t seem to stop throwing herself at this man, no matter how cold he’d turn afterward. “This is just like the other scenes, he arrives out of thin air. But for some reason, he hunted those wolves differently, stalking them slowly.”

“The city scenes were body dumps, remember? He could have stalked the others, we just don’t know where he initially attacked them.”

She nodded, forcing herself to concentrate on the puzzle before her instead of the brooding one at her back.

“It doesn’t matter. The answer isn’t here. It’s where he intercepted them. Since I can’t touch him, I’ll have to stay with the girl. Her signature gets stronger with her sense of impending danger. When I was running, I could almost see what she was seeing. It’s probably strongest where he finished the attack.”

He stared at her, his expression unreadable. “Can he hurt you again?”

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She blinked at the astuteness of the question. “No.”

At least, not in the same way. Though the Woodsman’s signature was an active force, like Rysen’s, it wouldn’t have the power to reach her through someone else’s signature. But reliving the girl’s last seconds wouldn’t be without its price. A price that would only be worth it if Jade could see the killer’s face or find any kind of clue that could lead them in his direction.

Rysen didn’t look as if he fully believed her, but he finally nodded and led her back toward the car. A brief ride up the mountain and he pulled over again. The brake made a creaking sound as he yanked up the handle to park. “You sure you want to do this? This girl didn’t die gently. Seeing it might be more difficult than you realize.”

Was there a better option? “I’ll be fine.” She opened the door and swung her legs out.

“Jade.”

She looked over her shoulder at him. His dark brows were drawn together, his brilliant eyes nearly white in the bright moonlight. Glowing. “What?”

“Don’t do anything that puts you in danger. I mean it.”

She bit back a resentful chuckle. “One of these days, Detective, we’re going to have to figure out exactly how far apart our concepts of danger really are.” Already pulling off her glove, she exited the car and set her sights on the darkening blue streak of the murdered girl’s signature.

She heard him say her name, the sound muffled and broken by the slamming of the car door, but she sank her hand into the color and the world around her disappeared.

Chapter Ten

Running.

Sliding.

Desperate.

Emmitt. Lead it away from Emmitt.

She spun, checking to see if it was following her.

Emmitt had been thrown so far and he was so small.

There was a chance he’d been knocked unconscious—

She screamed as something hit her, sending her flying backward.
It’s here. Where?

She rolled to her knees to get up and run. Something brushed fast against the back of her legs. A shifter, moving on all fours? She couldn’t tell, couldn’t see anything around her except shadows on the snow. Hardly any light, though the moon had been bright earlier.

Shouldn’t there be more light? The forest seemed to dim around her, the air that much harder to drag in.

What was that sound?
A whisper and a roar at the same time, slashing past her face
. Run, for God’s sake,
run.

The trees blurred, her feet barely touched the snow.

Until the darkness enveloped her completely and she stopped, her toes digging into the fallen ice.
No light. No
air. No escape.

Eyes wide, she spun, unable to even see the trees ahead. It was here. Blind, she reached her hands out, terrified to take even a breath though her lungs burned as if they were on fire.
Oh God, the sound aga—

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Pain unlike anything Jade had ever experienced smashed through her chest, the utter blackness of the girl’s memory flashing into a whiteout of agony. Her body jolted backward, her scream—not the girl’s, the girl never had a chance to scream—echoing off the mountainside and ringing in her ears.

She hadn’t landed in the snow. As her own senses returned to the forefront of her mind, her ragged breaths abated, leaving her drained and disoriented. She felt warmth and a near-bone-crushing hold around her body.

She’d been caught and, given the anger she was picking up without trying, she knew who was holding her.

She lifted her lashes. Maybe it was the snow and the brilliant moonlight, but the man holding her wasn’t the Pale Rysen she expected. His face looked colorless, what parts she could see of it above the beard, anyway. His eyes were wide, almost…afraid? One of his hands yanked open the coat flap and his open palm settled over her breastbone. She’d expected pain, because it felt as if she’d been ripped open mere seconds ago, but there was only relief when he touched flesh and bone. He must have felt it too, because his breath escaped in a rush.

But Jade didn’t get time enough to be sure of the emotion because his eyes narrowed and the growl that rumbled out of his throat shifted her concern from him right back to herself. His anger surged, white hot and rolling. “What the
hell
did you think you were doing?”

She blinked up at him, still gathering her frayed edges together, unable to form a response.

“You could have died, damn you.”

“No I couldn’t—”

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“No? Look at her.” He gave her a slight shake when she didn’t turn her head.

Swallowing thickly, she turned, knowing what she’d find. A teenage girl, splayed out like an angel, her long blond hair rippling in all directions. Dead. Blood spilled from her lips and nose, looking black on her frozen skin.

On the other side of the girl’s body, his brothers stood, watching them with predatory interest. Somehow she didn’t think they were overwhelming themselves with worry for her safety. They were watching her as if she were some kind of bug. Or was that how they watched something when they were trying to decide if it was a threat?