Captive Mate - Eliot Grayson Page 0,50

circus.

I was right. I froze, my heartbeat ratcheting up painfully, as I caught Parker’s scent. It was unmistakable, and so strong through my lynx’s nose that it made me glad I hadn’t eaten any mice to vomit up. His sweat, pungent and musky and faintly sour, his whiskey-tinged breath…I swallowed down bile.

This was good news. It was good news, because it meant he was still here to kill. I had to focus on the goal.

Fuck, but I wanted to turn stubby tail and run for it, run and run and run all the way to…Matthew, his dark head bent over me, his tongue turning me molten…fuck, I had nowhere to run to, especially if the Kimballs and Parker were planning an attack on the Armitages. Nowhere to go but — somewhere Parker wasn’t, and I couldn’t live like that.

I forced my jittery nerves to calm and drew deep breaths until my tangled thoughts drew back together into something like order.

Parker’s scent was only one of several, and I parsed through them as I crept forward, keeping to the shadows and slinking on my belly through taller tufts of grass and bits of undergrowth. Bill Kimball was there. So was his younger son, Jackson. There were two other scents I vaguely recognized but couldn’t put names to: one Kimball, and one from Parker’s pack.

Since Adam was dead, and Parker didn’t have a shaman of his own, there wouldn’t be any magical interference in my eavesdropping.

As I snuck around the corner of the building, looking for an open window, I caught another familiar scent: Colin Kimball. He wasn’t inside. His smell was coming from down the hill behind the meeting room.

Curious. He might be on guard, but with his father as the de facto pack leader, he’d be able to delegate that to someone else, right?

I detoured down the hill a little, picking my way around the small concrete patio littered with cigarette butts onto which the back door of the office opened. A few bushes ringed it, and I kept to their shadows. I was downwind from Colin, so I felt fairly confident.

As I got closer I could hear him, and I could finally catch his silhouette. One of his arms was bent, holding something to his head.

On the phone, then. I slunk closer.

“…not listening,” Colin hissed. “He’s convinced Taft and his pack are going to be enough to give him an edge. But they don’t give a fuck about us. Taft’s out to get his shaman, and once he does that, he’ll fuck off back to Nevada and leave us holding the bag. My dad thinks Jonah — yeah, the shaman — is going to end up staying with us and joining the pack, or something. He’s nuts.”

My ears pricked up. Dissent in the ranks? Someone who recognized Parker for the solipsistic, sadistic son-of-a-bitch he was?

I didn’t know Colin very well; he wasn’t someone I’d gone out of my way to talk to. He was lazy, and he didn’t take anything seriously, and I didn’t have time for people who didn’t care enough to have a purpose. And of course he was an alpha, so I despised him on principle — and my overall opinion of the Kimballs was somewhere down below what I thought of the parasitic worms you could catch from eating rodents. But maybe he wasn’t a total idiot.

More to the point, maybe he’d be a useful tool.

Colin was shaking his head, listening to whoever he was talking to. Who was he talking to? It couldn’t be someone in the Kimball pack. He’d have talked to them in person.

“Yeah, well, I tried that,” Colin snapped. “I’m telling you, he’s not listening. He’s so pissed about my uncle Sam he can’t fucking think straight. They want to go after Jonah early this morning, a full-on assault. The Armitages have their own pack, and no one in their right mind wants to fucking fight Ian Armitage, right?” Colin paused and then laughed, a humorless bark. “Right. And they have a warlock now, plus the vamp and his psychotic bodyguard to call in, since they hate us right now too after that bullshit with kidnapping those other vamps, plus whatever Jonah does. He could’ve been an ally in the Armitage territory if it was just us, but now with Taft coming after — no, he’s not Taft’s fucking mate, I told you. No. And even if he was, he’s too smart to want to — dude, I’m not going to