Heart of Vengeance (Alice Worth #6) - Lisa Edmonds Page 0,20
neck indicated she’d shifted. Sean kissed me again. “Go,” I said when we came up for air. I was breathing heavily, unable to ignore either his arousal or my own. I needed a cold shower. “Run with the others. As soon as we get home from Charles’s house, we’ll have some time to ourselves.”
With obvious reluctance, Sean let me slide down until my feet hit the ground. “We won’t be long,” he said. His voice had a little edge of growl that indicated his wolf was close to his skin. “And we won’t go far.”
“I’ll be fine.” As soon as I cooled down. “I’ll holler if I need you.”
He took a couple of steps back, went to his knees, and shifted in a powerful surge of golden shifter magic. Black magic threads twisted through the gold—the traces of Miraç’s power Sean had absorbed when I’d killed the sorcerer.
Every time I saw Miraç’s magic in Sean’s aura, I hated it more. Sean said it gave him more power and strengthened his bonds with pack members and that was all, but I had no more idea what effects Miraç’s black magic would have on Sean than on my own magic or body. I knew Miraç’s magic was slowly killing me. What if it was damaging Sean too? Or changing him? Black magic was evil, and we’d gotten ours from an evil man.
As much as Miraç’s power added to my own, I had to get rid of it somehow to save my life. I wanted it gone from Sean too, but I had no idea how to do either of those things.
Sean’s wolf was enormous—black and gray, with beautiful golden eyes. He raised his head and howled. Nan’s gray wolf answered from near the tree line. In the distance, Jesse and Joshua howled from the field beyond the trees.
Sean nudged my hand with his nose, then headed off into the trees with Nan to join the Hayes brothers to run and hunt. If there were no issues, Sean would invite the brothers to meet the rest of the pack, and then they’d do the formalities of registering the Hayes brothers as pack members with the Council.
The weather was beautiful. If we’d been in Sean’s truck, I would have sat on the tailgate, but his truck had been totaled by heavily armed panther shifters on motorcycles, so we were in one of his company SUVs. I got into the SUV, shut the door, and leaned back in the passenger seat. My back still ached.
When my phone buzzed, I glanced at the screen. Mr. Sunshine Calling. I hit the green button. “Hello, Matthias. What’s up?”
Matthias Albrecht was a longtime enforcer for the Vampire Court. In the wake of the death of her traitorous personal guard Hanson, Valas had promoted Matthias to take his place.
He and one of my best friends, Vamp Court investigator Arkady Woodall, were in a rather volatile on-again, off-again relationship. At the moment they were back on, but their philosophical differences about what it meant to be employed by the Court and how much loyalty the Court demanded were major points of disagreement. Matthias obeyed Valas and other members of the Court in all things. Arkady didn’t believe in following their orders when it conflicted with her own sense of right and wrong.
At the moment, they enjoyed the resulting angry sex, but Arkady confided she’d all but decided their relationship had to end. Matthias was loyal foremost to the Court, and despite how much he liked her, he couldn’t understand why Arkady was so resistant to their system of complete and total loyalty.
“Ms. Worth,” Matthias rumbled. “Madame Valas requires your presence at Northbourne.”
I glanced out the window. The sun was still an hour from setting. The older the vamp, the earlier they rose. Valas was more than a thousand years old. When, where, and for how long she slept each day were closely guarded secrets, but I’d started to wonder if she slept at all.
“Sean and I have a meeting with Charles Vaughan at ten,” I said. “What does Valas want? Because if it’s another case for the Court, I’m probably not interested.”
I didn’t have to see his face to know Matthias didn’t approve of the way I referred to his boss so informally, or that I would turn down a job for the Court. “Madame Valas did not tell me specifically what she wishes to discuss, only that it pertains to your prior agreement.” He put subtle emphasis on the last