going home to shower the stink of shifter off me. Bane, you and I are going to have a long, long talk, my brother.”
He nodded, barely looking up. “I’m…sorry.”
“And you—what?” Silence followed, as if he’d shocked her to speechlessness. Maybe he had. Apologies were not exactly his fucking specialty.
“I’m sorry. I really am, Meara, and I’ll make it up to you, but right now I’m taking Ryan home, and then I’m going to find these necromancers, rip their heads off, and shove them up their asses,” he snarled.
“I’ll go with you,” Edge said, his voice pure ice. “They dared to touch Meara. All of them are going to die tonight.”
Meara sighed. “Let’s regroup at the house. These said they have a new alpha, so clearly something is going on that we need to find out about. Let’s not go off half-cocked just yet.”
“It would be better to find out the facts first. And, Meara, they said new mistress, not new alpha. Is that the same?” Ryan murmured, awake again.
“No, it’s not,” Edge said. “They must have been talking about Sylvie, the warlock who attacked me, unless there are even more of them around.”
“She must be a necromancer, too,” Meara said grimly.
Ryan pushed against Bane’s chest. “Put me down, please.”
“Never,” he swore, tightening his arms. “I leave you alone for a few hours, and you start a fight with a shifter pack.”
She sighed. “Yes. That’s exactly how it happened. And we still need to talk about how you locked me in that room.”
“Oh, mon Dieu. Not this again.” Meara threw her hands into the air. “I’m out of here.”
“I’m with her,” Edge said, firing up his bike.
“They touched you,” Bane told Ryan, his brain locked onto that fact. “They have to die.”
“Let me down now, please. I am perfectly capable of standing on my own two feet.”
Instead, he called to the Shadows and stepped into the Between, still carrying the woman he’d just proven he’d kill for. Knew he would die for.
When the vortex closed around them, Ryan screamed, startling him so much that he lost his focus, and they tumbled out of the Between before reaching their destination.
Into a cemetery.
The cemetery, to be precise.
“Are we in Bonaventure?” Ryan was trembling in his arms, now clutching his shirt. “And what the hell just happened? Was that some freaky kind of vampire transporter? Did you just beam us up? Is that how you disappeared with Hunter Evans? And maybe give a person a warning before you pull shit like that?”
She paused for long enough to suck in a huge breath. “And you’d better put me down. I feel like I’m going to throw up.”
…
Ryan bent over and put her hands on her thighs, taking in deep, calming breaths, for three or four minutes. Whatever Bane had just done to them had felt like being swept into the middle of a tornado. It was even worse than Meara’s driving. And that was on top of the shock of blood loss to her body…she really needed to be resting and drinking orange juice, not standing in a cemetery with a vampire.
A burble of a laugh escaped her lips. Standing in a cemetery with a vampire was another good title for her memoir. That, or a good name for a rock band.
And yeah, wow, the blood loss had fuzzed her brain.
“They touched you. They all have to die,” Bane repeated, stalking back and forth, looking like nothing so much as an avenging angel, especially here, surrounded by monuments to death.
Given the fact that he was a vampire, his eyes were still glowing that bright scarlet, and they were standing in the middle of the freaking cemetery, the impression might not be that far off.
“I killed one,” she blurted out. “Or, at least, I thought I killed him. If he’d been human instead of a shifter, I’d be a murderer.”
The shaking threatened to take over again, and she could feel the hyperventilating coming on. She hadn’t had a full-blown panic attack since the time she’d been trapped in a dark elevator for three hours during a power outage in New York, but this was shaping up to be a whiz banger of one.
“One,” she counted, closing her eyes, and then she took a slow, steady breath. “Two.”
Exhale. “Three.”
Breathe in. “Four.”
And so on, until she got to fifteen and felt the edges of the panic attack subside. When she opened her eyes, Bane stood inches away from her, staring at her with eyes that had changed from