His gut knotting, he sat down on the bed beside her and brushed his hand through her curls. His poor Amazon. So fierce and proud.
Unable to protect the things she loved most.
Now he understood why she'd freaked out in the fight and locked him out in the hallway. It'd probably reminded her of the night she'd died and she'd reacted on instinct. But he wasn't a human.
He was a bear.
And it would take more than a Daimon to kill him. A lot more.
"I won't let them hurt you, Sam," he whispered as her curls tugged at his fingers. The silken strands wrapped around his skin the same way foreign emotions for her wrapped around his heart.
If the Daimons wanted her, they were about to get the fight of their lives. And yet as that thought went through him, it was followed by another.
An image of her dying in front of him the way his mother had while he was powerless to stop it. Pain lacerated him.
This wasn't a fear, he knew it.
It was a premonition.
Dev stalked through Nick's Bourbon Street mansion searching for a sign of the little prick. He had to have gone somewhere. It wasn't like Nick had simply vanished into nothing. And this was still the most likely place to find him. No matter what, Nick would always return to his home. The fact he was here as a Dark-Hunter after only having died a couple of years ago said it all. Artemis normally required a minimum of a hundred years to pass before a Dark-Hunter returned to the city he'd been killed in--the idea was that after that amount of time any immediate friends and family would be dead and the memories wouldn't be quite so harsh. But Nick needed his touchstone--this house and this city. He couldn't function without them. It was like New Orleans fed his soul, which Dev could understand. And right now he was grateful for that because it would bring Nick back into his circle.
Yeah, Ethon had told him he'd stopped by earlier looking for him and he wasn't here, but it wasn't the same.
Ethon wasn't out to kill him. He only wanted to hurt the Cajun.
Dev intended to use Nick's entrails as shoelaces, but first he needed Nick's fresh scent. No one betrays me. No one. There was too much history between him and Nick for Dev to let this one go. The fact that the little Cajun guttersnipe had brought Daimons into his home--no, his room--was a declaration of war. Nick had offered all of them up to the Daimons and Dev wanted a piece of him so bad he could already savor it. Not to mention the small fact that Nick had hurt Sam.
Yeah, the bastard was going to pay with his life.
But Nick wasn't here and from the looks and faint smell of things, he hadn't been in here in a couple of days. The house appeared to have been abandoned. The bed wasn't slept in. There were no dirty towels or even a wet sink to say he'd brushed his teeth or bathed. His Jaguar XK-R was still parked in the garage. None of his clothes or shoes seemed to be missing.
Weird. Where could he have gone? Nick had told his guard Dogs that he was going to bed. No one had seen him since and that had been four days ago.
Leaving the immaculate bedroom, Dev paused in the upstairs hallway as he spied one of the pictures on the wall that made up a huge montage of Nick's early life--something his mom must have placed here. While Nick could be an arrogant ass, he usually wasn't conceited.
The photo that drew his attention was one of him, Nick's mom, Aimee, and Nick, who'd been around the age of fifteen at the time. The women had been trying to get a good photo with him, but Nick had been Nick--goofing off and cutting up. So Dev had come up behind him and wrapped him in a headlock. Dev's mom had snapped the photo that had Nick laughing while Dev pretended to choke him and Aimee and Nick's mother had feigned shock. It was a really cute photo.
And that one moment made him take a step back from what was going on. How could that boy have grown into a man who'd threaten Dev's family? Nick had fought on their side against the wolf pack just a few months back. Sanctuary was as much his home as this house was and while Nick wasn't quite right anymore, he wasn't that different.
Was he? Could he really have betrayed them all?
What if he didn't and you're wrong about him? What if he had a reason for what he'd done?
Something strange was going on. In his gut, he knew it.
Now that he thought more about it, Nick wouldn't have breached Sanctuary without a damn good reason. The Cajun might be a lot of things, but he'd never been a turncoat.
"Boy, what have you gotten yourself into?"
"We have a problem."
Acheron froze as Urian materialized directly in front of him. Thank the gods he'd pulled on a pair of pajama bottoms before he came into the kitchen to get his wife the bowl of Chunky Monkey ice cream she'd been craving. Otherwise Urian would now be blind and he'd be even more pissed at the interruption. "Were you raised in a barn?"
A loud knock sounded on the back door.
Acheron rolled his eyes at Urian's sarcasm when it was obvious Urian had thrown the sound as a "screw you" to him. Lucky for you, I just had great sex with my wife that put me in such a happy place not even your assholishness can disturb it. Otherwise Urian would have been a flaming stain on the wall. "What's up?"
"Dev's not on crack."