Down below, the Shadow reached out, pulled the woman into him by the neck, and kissed her. Then he put the vehicle in reverse and drove off without looking back.
Xcor shifted his position to keep up with the male, going from rooftop to rooftop, as the Shadow headed toward the club district on the surface roads that ran parallel to the river—
At first, the sensation in his body suggested a change in wind direction, the chilly gusts seeming to come up from behind him, as opposed to hitting him face-first. But then he thought…no. It was purely internal. Whatever ripples he felt were under his skin—
His Chosen was nearby.
His Chosen.
Immediately abandoning the Shadow’s trail, he peeled off and headed closer to the Hudson River. What was she doing down—
In a car. She was traveling in a car.
From what his instincts were telling him, she was going at a fast speed that was nonetheless trackable. So the only explanation was that she was on the Northway, going sixty or seventy miles an hour.
Proceeding back in the direction of the rows of warehouses, he focused on the signal he was picking up on. As it had been months since he’d fed from her, he was panicked to find that the connection created by her blood in his veins was fading—to the point that it was difficult to pinpoint the vehicle.
But then he locked in on a luxury sedan thanks to the fact that it slowed down and got off at the exit that funneled traffic onto the bridges. Dematerializing up onto the girders, he planted his combat boots on the pinnacle of one of the steel risers and waited for her to pass under him.
Shortly thereafter she did, and then continued onward, heading to the other half of the city on the opposite shore.
He stayed on her, maintaining a safe distance, although he wondered who he was fooling. If he could sense his female?
It would be the same for her.
But he would not abandon her trail.
As Qhuinn sat in the passenger seat of the Mercedes, his Heckler & Koch forty-five was held discreetly on his thigh, and his eyes flipped incessantly from the rearview mirror to the side window to the windshield. Next to him, Phury was behind the wheel, the Brother’s hands doing a ten-and-two so tightly it was like he was strangling somebody.
Man, there was too much goddamn shit unraveling right now.
Layla and the young. That whole Cessna incident. What Qhuinn had done to his own cousin the night before. And then…well, there was the Blay thing.
Oh, dear God in heaven…the Blay thing.
As Phury got off the exit that would take them onto the bridges, Qhuinn’s brain shifted from worrying about Layla to reviewing all kinds of pictures and sounds and…tastes from the daylight hours.
Intellectually, he knew what had happened between them hadn’t been a dream—and his body sure as hell remembered everything, like the sex had been a kind of branding on his flesh that changed the way he looked forever. And yet, as he went about dealing with the newest frickin’ drama, the too-short session seemed prehistoric, not less than a night old.
He feared it was a one-and-only.
Don’t you touch me like that.
Groaning, he rubbed at his head.
“It’s not about your eyes,” Phury said.
“I’m sorry?”
Phury glanced into the backseat. “Hey, how we doing?” he asked the females. When Layla and Doc Jane answered in some sort of affirmative, he nodded. “Listen, I’m going to shut the partition for a sec, ’kay? All good up here.”
The Brother didn’t give them a chance to answer one way or another, and Qhuinn stiffened in his seat as the opaque shield rose up, cutting the sedan into two halves. He wasn’t going to run from any kind of confrontation, but that didn’t mean he was looking forward to round two of this one—and if Phury was cutting the pair in the back off, it wasn’t going to be pretty.
“Your eyes are not the problem,” the Brother said.
“Excuse me?”
Phury looked over. “My being pissed off about this has got nothing to do with any defect. Layla’s in love with you—”
“No, she’s not.”
“See, you’re really pissing me off right now.”
“Ask her.”
“While she’s miscarrying your young?” the Brother snapped. “Yeah, I’ll do that.”
As Qhuinn winced, Phury continued. “See, here’s the thing with you. You like living on the edge and being all wild—frankly, I think it helps you come to terms with the bullshit your family put you through. If you iconoclast everything? Nothing can hurt you. And believe it or not, I don’t have a problem with that. You do you, and get through your nights and your days any way you can. But as soon as you break the heart of an innocent—especially if she’s under my care? That’s when you and I have an issue.”
Qhuinn looked out his window. First off, props to the big man over there. The idea that there was a judgment against Qhuinn based on his character instead of a genetic mutation he hadn’t volunteered for was a refreshing change. And hey, it wasn’t that he didn’t agree with the guy—at least not until about a year ago. Back before then? Hell, yeah, he’d been out of control on a lot of levels. But things had changed. He had changed.
Evidently, Blay becoming unavailable was the kind of boot in the balls he’d needed to finally grow the fuck up.
“I’m not like that anymore,” he said.
“So you are in fact prepared to mate her?” When he didn’t reply, Phury shrugged. “And there you go. Bottom line—I’m responsible for her, legally and morally. I may not be behaving like the Primale in some respects, but the rest of the job description I take pretty goddamn seriously. The idea that you got her into this mess makes me sick to my stomach, and I find it very hard to believe that she didn’t do this to please you—you said you both wanted a young? Are you sure that it wasn’t just you, and she did it because she wanted to make you happy? That’s very much her way.”
This was all presented as a rhetorical. And it wasn’t like Qhuinn could criticize the logic, even if it happened to be wrong. But as he dragged a hand through his hair, the fact that Layla was the one who had come to him was something he kept to himself. If Phury wanted to think it was all his fault, that was fine—he’d carry that load. Anything to take the pressure and attention off Layla.
Phury stared across the seats. “It wasn’t right, Qhuinn. That’s not what a real male does. And now look at the situation she’s in. You did this to her. You put her in the backseat of this car, and that’s just wrong.”
Qhuinn squeezed his eyes shut. Well, wasn’t that going to be banging around the inside of his head for the next hundred years. Give or take.
As they started over the bridge and left the twinkling lights of downtown behind, he kept his godforsaken yap shut, and Phury fell silent as well.
Then again, the Brother had said it all, hadn’t he.
THIRTY-THREE
Assail ended up further tracking his prey from behind the wheel of his Range Rover. Much cozier this way—and it wasn’t as if the woman’s location was an issue now: While he’d been waiting by the Audi for her to come off his property, he’d attached a tracking device to the underbelly of her side-view mirror.
His iPhone took care of the rest.
After she’d left his neighborhood in a rush—following his deliberate dematerialization from sight just to further destabilize her—she had crossed the river and headed around to the backside of the city, where the houses were small, packed in close to one another, and finished with aluminum siding.
As he trolled behind her, keeping at least two blocks between their vehicles, he regarded the brightly colored lights in the neighborhoods, the thousands of strands of twinklers strung among bushes and hanging from roof lips and boxing out windows and doorframes. But that wasn’t the half of it. Manger scenes placed prominently on tiny front lawns were spotlit, and there were also fat white snowmen with red scarves and blue pants that glowed from within.