He was a good head taller than her, at least six-five, rivalling Hartt’s height. Unlike the elf, he was built, heavy with muscle that would slow him down but gave him strength. Not that it bothered her. If it came down to a fight, she could take him. She thought. She had fought jaguars in the past, but his scent was different. He felt different.
His bright golden eyes searched hers, leaping between them as he frowned at her, as if he was trying to figure her out. Maybe he was. What did she care? She doubted he would be able to tell what she was just by looking at her. Hartt was right about her kind. They were more myth than anything, fairy-tales told to young children or written about in stories to entertain bored minds.
“You know, we didn’t have to come and warn you.” She couldn’t stop herself from putting that out there. “If I had known this was the welcome we were going to get, I would have convinced Hartt not to bother and let you take your chances.”
But she had honestly believed these were his friends, that the reason coming here had been so important to him was because he cared about these people. As far as she could tell, they were more like enemies.
“Warn me about what?” The male glanced at Hartt.
Hartt scowled at him. “I refuse to talk about this out here, in the open.”
Mackenzie looked along the street in both directions. Her limited senses scoured the area. Everyone she could feel was indoors, either sleeping or not moving much. They had the late hour to thank for that. She looked skyward, at the heavy clouds that filled the space between the blocky brick buildings. What time was it anyway?
She frowned and pouted, her mood souring further as a fine drizzle began to fall.
She hated rain.
Jaguar stared at Hartt for another full minute, until she was close to either throttling him until he let them in before the weather turned worse or convincing Hartt to leave and take her back to Hell where she didn’t have to deal with rain.
In the end, the male grunted, “Fine.”
He yanked the metal door open and went inside, and she glanced at Hartt. Before she could ask him why they had come to this place, to people who obviously hated him, he followed the jaguar inside.
Mackenzie narrowed the focus of her senses to the nightclub as the door swung closed in front of her. People were moving around upstairs, off to her right. What snagged her attention was the fact that she couldn’t only sense Hartt and the shifter inside on the ground floor. Another signature had joined them.
She grabbed the handle and pulled the door open, slipped inside and moved cautiously as her eyes adjusted to the darkness in the long wide hallway. She breathed through a momentary flare of panic, held it together and focused on the lights ahead of her. She was fine. There was light there. She just had to reach it.
Her vision adjusted again as she reached the end of the corridor and the space opened up into a huge room on her left. The wall to her right continued in a straight line, running behind a long bar lit by lazily rotating coloured lights that glinted off the rows of bottles lined up in front of mirrored panels.
“Hartt?” The soft female voice arrested Mackenzie’s focus, had her gaze leaping from the impressive collection of bottles of alcohol to the owner of it—a stunning, ethereally beautiful woman with sleek black hair and a figure to die for clad in black leather trousers and a dark spaghetti-strap camisole.
Mackenzie’s gaze darted to Hartt and she didn’t miss how he rubbed the back of his neck or how he couldn’t seem to bring himself to look at the female.
The elf female.
The jaguar growled when Hartt finally lifted his head and locked his eyes on the woman, and Mackenzie realised something.
They had come here to warn someone he cared about.
The elf.
“Iolanthe,” Hartt started and then frowned at the jaguar when he growled again, when he moved to the elf female and wrapped his arm around her tiny waist in a possessive move.
Mackenzie lingered by the hallway, in the shadows, her feet set in concrete as she stared at Hartt and began to fear he more than cared about this elf female.