Hector cleared his throat and looked at Tala. “I’ll need you to stick to Lyra and Jace as much as you can, Channing. If they go out, you’re going, too. To the crime scene, to the hotel, to a restaurant. Wherever. Your job is to keep the press away from them. Got me?”
Tala’s gaze locked onto Jace. Heat instantly surged through his body. It was getting mighty uncomfortable in his jeans. Lord help him if he got an erection here and now. Talk about bad timing.
But the intensity of her stare made him quiver all over. She had power, this female. He had no clue why it affected him or how she possessed it. She smelled like Other, but he knew her not to be. It was an oddity and he wasn’t sure if he was equipped to deal with it.
“I got you, sir,” she said at last, then dropped her gaze.
“Take a couple of hours. Go home, get showered, eat and be back here ready to go fourteen hours if need be.”
With a curt nod, she turned on her heel and marched out of the analysis room.
Sighing, Jace closed his eyes and ran a shaky hand through his mop of hair. This case was getting tougher by the minute. And he wasn’t talking about the crime. That could be solved, eventually, with hard work and careful analysis of the evidence. It was the mystery of Tala Channing that piqued his interest. Who was she? And why did he want her so bad that he would drop to his knees in submission to have her?
Chapter 5
V iolent fury raged through him while he sat on the hard wooden chair and stared out the apartment window toward the pinkened San Antonio skyline. His entire body shook with it.
They were here. He could feel them close by. The stink of their Otherworlder flesh nearly made him keel over in revulsion. To think he had spent so many years around them without doing just that.
Caine and his team of miscreants were in San Antonio trying to make sense of the latest murder. He smiled, worrying his fangs against his bottom lip. He was confident that they would never figure it out. They were too stupid and he was much too smart. He’d been doing this for longer than most of them had been alive.
They had thought they had caught their killer. Using Mel Howard had been a fantastic ruse. The vampire had been greedy and pliable, eager to please someone he knew to be his master. The perfect pawn in his ongoing game.
Caine and his team had fallen for it beautifully. Like a movie being played out, perfectly scripted and brilliantly acted.
And he was the director.
Low mewls broke into his thoughts, disturbing him. Annoyed, he glanced over his shoulder at the queen-size bed in the middle of the bedroom. Standing, he ambled toward the bed. He enjoyed the way his na**d body glistened with crimson streaks even in the soft light made by the black candles lit around the room.
As he neared, the young woman bound to the mattress began to whimper under her gag. He could smell her terror. It was a fragrant bouquet, making him drool with hunger.
He touched her foot and ran his long nails up to her ankle, where the rope he used to bind her dug cruelly into her sweet, pale flesh. Running his forefinger over the restraints, he gathered the blood and skin shed there onto the pad of his finger. He brought it up to his mouth and sucked it between his lips. Such sweet honey.
Taking a step away from the bed, he studied his work. A network of crisscrossing red marks lined her body. He had spent hours on her. Every cut took several seconds to complete and he had reveled in the way she had squirmed and whimpered in agony.
The girl had been an easy mark. So easily charmed and seduced. He had picked her out in a club. Plied her with drinks and compliments, then accepted her invitation up to her apartment. Silly girl had no clue exactly what she had been inviting into her bed.
She knew now.
By the way she stared at him in utter horror, she knew exactly what he was and where he’d come from.
He trailed his talon over her torso to her breast. She tried to draw back from his touch, but she had nowhere to go. He chuckled at her instinctive response.
She was going to make a lovely present for Caine and his team.
“You’re going to die, my dear,” he chimed in a singsong voice. “And it’s going to be brutal and painful.”
Chapter 6
T ala unbuttoned her white blouse, shrugged it off and tossed it into the hamper in the corner of her bedroom. Walking to her closet, she grabbed an identical shirt. As she slipped it on and started buttoning it, she wandered out of her bedroom and into the kitchen.
She thanked whatever benevolent spirit had allowed her a few hours to come home and recharge. Being in the lab had been stifling. She had tried hard not to be in the same room as Jace. She volunteered to get coffee, run to the various labs, be the go-between, anything to keep her out of the same space as the lycan. It had been working up until Lyra had called her in to run the computer.
Although Tala had only been in the room with him for no more than fifteen minutes, she could still feel the electrical current that had been zinging through the air between them skimming across her skin. She’d never felt anything like it before. And she didn’t want to feel it ever again.
He was off-limits.
She shouldn’t even have been thinking about him, especially in such sensual ways. It was far too dangerous. Even though everything about him screamed sex and seduction, she had to force herself to stay away. Of course, that was going to be nearly impossible since Hector had assigned her as Jace and Lyra’s police escort. Why couldn’t she have gotten the vampire and his human wife? She had no fear of them.