gods he’d misinterpreted her agitation.
He pressed a protrusion of rock and the wall in front of her slid open.
“It’s just like in the movies,” she said, wonder in her voice.
“Isn’t it, though?” He grinned, his glee like that of a nerdy schoolboy. If he wasn’t such a complete whack job, she thought they could have been friends. She wondered what could have happened in the past to have turned a seemingly ordinary guy into a madman. “Come on.”
The rock face closed behind them, and lights flickered on, showing a tunnel that headed into the mountain hundreds of yards deep. “This way,” Stefan said.
Finn padded on four paws around a mesquite tree. He’d followed Liuz and Keira, at first on his motorcycle and then, after they’d started up the trail, he’d drawn on his chameleon abilities and shapeshifted into a mountain lion. He’d made sure to stay downwind of them so Liuz with his superior vampire sense of smell wouldn’t detect him. Finn didn’t know how Liuz would react if he thought he was being stalked by a mountain lion or, rather, a shapeshifter in the form of a mountain lion.
At first Finn had followed the two because he’d been jealous. He was certain Liuz had been about to take Keira home with him. He wasn’t sure what he would have done if that had been the case. He really hadn’t thought it through. But when the vampire had turned the car off the freeway and headed up into the mountains, curiosity had overtaken jealousy. When Keira changed her shoes it became apparent to him there was going to be walking involved. He knew he’d have an easier time of it going four-footed, so he’d shifted. That had been two hours ago, and he was having a hard time maintaining this form.
He’d slipped down to the mouth of the cave in time to see the rock face slide away to reveal the rest of the tunnel. He knew he couldn’t move fast enough to get there before it closed, so he’d decided to reconnoiter the area. Liuz was a lot of things, but he wasn’t stupid. There would be guards posted. Finn needed to see how many, and where.
It felt odd, seeing the world through the eyes of a large cat. While colors didn’t seem as bright, things were much more defined, and he could see farther and over a wider field of view than he could even with the sharp vision of a demon.
Things smelled differently, too. To take advantage of the superior smell of the cat, he dropped his jaw and wrinkled his muzzle, opening the passage to the sensitive Jacobson’s organ at the roof of his mouth. He smelled mesquite, a jackrabbit not that far away, a few deer closer to the foot of the mountain, and there, finally, a waft of preternatural. There seemed to be three distinct types—a werewolf, a vampire, and something else, some sort of shapeshifter he’d never smelled before.
He sidled around a few barrel cacti, made his way past a small group of scrub trees and stopped, straining to see in the darkness to find what his nose told him was just up ahead.
After a few minutes he saw him. The guard, cradling a high-powered rifle complete with scope, was high above the mine, at least two hundred feet up on a rocky ledge. Finn stared at him, trying to figure out how in the hell the guy had gotten up there. He must have rappelled down, he finally decided, because even in his cat form Finn would have a hard time with that terrain. That guard wouldn’t be easy to take out, and he had a bird’s-eye view of everyone who approached the mine.
Which meant Finn had been spotted, but he didn’t sense any alarm on the parts of the guards, so mountain lion sightings around here must be common. He circled around and found the other two prets he’d smelled earlier, one on either side of the cave. Both of them held the same type of weapon as the first man. Their preternatural abilities wouldn’t help them take out threats from a distance, but these rifles surely could.
With Keira inside, he didn’t want to kill the guards and alert Liuz there was trouble. The vampire would most likely assume Keira had something to do with it and immediately strike out at her. Finn would have to wait and remove the threat when he came back to destroy the machine.
The next time