Tearing his mouth from hers, his head dropped back as
she scored his chest. Her hands sought his hair, her mouth hungering for his,
chasing the sensation, chasing the thunderous orgasm unfurling within them..
Then it roared to life on a spontaneous convulsion, one vertebra-cracking
explosion that left them both a crumpled heap on the floor.
She couldn’t open her eyes as pleasure tore through
her. The only thing that grounded her was wrapping her fists in his long,
silken black hair.
“Are you all right?” he rasped, cradling her body away
from the damp dungeon stones.
She simply nodded. “No other women. I am Were and I am
your wife.”
“No other women,” he whispered, burying his wet face
against her neck. “The ancestors have answered my prayers.”
Garth stopped at a stone door that was ajar, put a
finger to his lips, and slipped beyond it. Sasha, Hunter, and Silver Hawk
followed quickly, entering the dark cavern relying on night vision that the
elderly Gnome apparently didn’t need. It was clear by the quickness of his
steps that Garth knew every nook and crevice of the tunnel by heart. Things
skittered; beetles and slimy things took cover at the invasion. But the group
of three kept pace behind Garth until he cleared away a large stone by the wave
of his wand and then moved back a hang of bramble with his arm.
“Does your human contraption work here, milady?” Garth
asked, looking at Sasha. “We are outside the magic barriers. This section of
the fortress is merely the craft of camouflage.”
“Contraption? You mean my cell phone?”
“Yes, that thing that allows you to talk to your human
soldiers.”
Sasha pulled her cell phone out of her pocket. Within
seconds it began vibrating. She gave Hunter and Silver Hawk a glance, and then
returned her focus to Garth.
“I’m assuming you know what this is all about?”
Garth nodded. “Our reinforcements are coming in from
across the waters—riding Dragons. Your humans will be at risk if they try to
fly their planes and use weapons against them. Our home allies ’ave combined
their magic and come through the Fae Stonehenge portals. The human soldiers may
not understand and it could cost them their lives; more important, it could tip
off the Vampires.”
“Oh, shit!” Sasha looked at her BlackBerry. Colonel
Madison had left a series of urgent messages that were blocked while she was
inside the magic barriers of the castle. Walking in a circle, Sasha connected
to the return call. He didn’t even wait to hear her voice.
“Trudeau, where the hell have you been?”
Sasha held the phone away from her ear. “Long story,
sir, but your radar may show—”
“Something insane coming in hot over Lake
Pontchartrain!”
“Aye, it would make sense that the Scots would lead by
invoking the lake power of Loch Ness,” Garth said, quietly conferring with
Silver Hawk.
“What? Who are you talking to?” Colonel Madison
yelled.
“Friendlies who are aware of the situation, sir. I’m
on my way.” Sasha looked at their pack shaman. “Silver Hawk, can you stay here
at the sidhe with Garth while Hunter and I head to NAS? We need you both to try
to make contact with the Dragon squads to ask for tolerance while we negotiate
with the Air Force to try to get them to stand down.”
She and Hunter didn’t wait for the old men to nod.
They were in and out of a shadow, and in the war room with Colonel Madison,
stepping out of a darkened corner so quickly that they almost got shot.
“Jesus H. Christ, Trudeau—I still can’t get used to
seeing you two do that.” Colonel Madison motioned for the men in the room to
stand down.
“The radar is going nuts, sir,” a radar engineer said
as Sasha neared his screens. “I think these guys are jamming. I set up
one-minute tells and initially there was just a huge blob of fast-moving
activity, then it looked like it exploded into all these smaller blips headed
for New Orleans.”
“We’ve scrambled jets—”
“No, no, no,” Sasha said quickly. “Call them back!”
“That blob,” Hunter said, pointing to the screen, “is
where a full European Dragon-rider Fae strike force is coming in from Scotland,
England, probably the Netherlands, Ireland, wherever the Seelie strongholds
are.”
“The Joint Chiefs will need an explanation.” Colonel
Madison’s attention ricocheted between Sasha, Hunter, and the radar screens.
“I’m in command of the Paranormal Containment Unit, but the commander of NAS is
responsible for anything unauthorized coming into our airspace.”
“Then get that commander on the phone and tell him
that not only will his men be in peril if they don’t stand down, but it’s also
likely that a couple of billion dollars of aviation equipment could get fried
out of the sky if they don’t heed your advice.” Sasha turned back to the
screen, watching fighter jets close in on the scattered targets.
“Get me Commander Davis on the line,” Colonel Madison
barked to his men. As soon as the line connected, he wasted no time with
formalities, filling in his Air Force colleague quickly.
“We had to scramble F-16s, Madison, until we had a confirm
that this was supernatural and not a foreign hostile,” Commander Davis argued.
“But Dragons, are you shittin’ me?”
“Roger that. Get your men out of the air.”
“But if Dragons are headed toward New Orleans, our job
is to protect the U.S. from any—”
“Get your men out of the sky, man!” Colonel Madison
yelled, and then put Commander Davis on speakerphone.
“Tell your men to open a channel,” Sasha said, walking
around the table. “By now they ought to have a visual. They are gonna be
freaked out and will need you to talk them down and give the order to come back
to base.”
“Who’s speaking?”
“Captain Sasha Trudeau,” Sasha said, without thinking,
and then amended her title. “Recently retired, and on retainer with the PCU
under Colonel Madison—special project of the POTUS and the Joint Chiefs.”
The room was silent as a disgruntled noise filtered
through the speakerphone.
“Open a channel,” Commander Davis finally said to his
men. “I want them to rendezvous back to base. Tell them to fall back.”
But as soon as the channel opened, the frenzied voices
of men in the air filled the speaker:
“There’s fire everywhere! I’ve never seen anything
like it, sir!”
“Something’s got my plane from beneath! I’m in a hard
roll and can’t shake it, can’t eject—there’s something on top of my bird, sir.
I’m going down!”
“I’ve got a visual, but I can’t fucking believe what
I’m seeing, sir!”
“Tell them not to fire! Pull back!” Sasha shouted.
“Tell them to stop pursuit!”
Sasha and Hunter stared at the screens. The fighter
jets were inside what looked like an asteroid belt of fast-moving screen blips.
Gun reports from aircraft-mounted machine guns and
explosions filled the speaker as men’s screams made Sasha close her eyes.
“Call them back,” she said firmly, and then leaned
into the speaker. “This is not our war, call those men back.”
“What do you mean, this isn’t our war!” Commander
Davis shouted. “I’ve just lost two pilots and—”
“Then save ten more and call them back!” Colonel
Madison yelled. “If it is paranormal, and it is, I have the authority!”
“Fall back,” Colonel Davis grudgingly said after a
moment. “Head back to base.”
No one spoke as they listened to the retreat. Sasha
prayed that it wouldn’t be too late. Once a Dragon squadron sensed an attack,
they’d go after the offenders until the last Dragon was in the air. But the
eerie quiet and then hearing the base protocols to land planes finally made her
release her breath. Obviously the Dragons had bigger fish to fry.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Hunter said to Sasha, and
then looked at Colonel Madison.
Colonel Madison kicked over an empty chair. “A damned
waste. It didn’t have to happen.” He turned toward the speaker and yelled, “It
didn’t have to happen!”
Damage control was already under way as Sasha and
Hunter walked down the long corridor to her team’s temporary offices. The media
spin would be that two fighter pilots crashed when they collided during a night
training mission—hence all the fire and explosions. The ammo wasn’t supposed to
be live; some poor grunt made a mistake. Sasha raked her fingers through her
hair. When was it going to end?
Hunter held her elbow just as they got to the door.
“It wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t their fault. It was tragic—no more, no less.”
She nodded, glad to be able to look into his intense
brown eyes. There was a level of calm there that she required now. A steadiness
that she couldn’t wrap words around but that mattered very deeply.
“Thank you,” she said in a quiet voice, still numb
from watching two human beings die for no good reason. She stroked Hunter’s
cheek with her knuckles. “There was a time when it was all so simple. A Dragon
terrorized a village for a bit, and then some hero came along and slayed it. A
demon-infected Werewolf might ravage a country town, until the locals got up
enough nerve to go hunt it down with pitchforks and torches, and behead it.”
She smiled, loving the way she’d coaxed a smile out of hiding on his somber
face. “Then there was always that one really over-the-top Vampire viceroy, who
got staked in broad daylight after the locals got tired of him bleeding out
their daughters. What happened to simple, Hunter?”
“Technology killed it,” he said, giving her a hug.
“Seems like everything is moving faster. problems are bigger.
Before, one brave knight could solve it all and go down in history for a
century or two until the next monster reared its ugly head.”
“You’re making fun of me.” She kissed his neck quickly
and then pulled back.
He nodded and smiled. “Yes. I am. It was never as
simple as was recorded in legend.”
“I know.” As her smile faded she touched his cheek
again and reached for the door.
“But I wish it was, Sasha.” He held her arm. “For you.
I so wish it was.”
“For you, too,” she whispered, and then turned back to
the door and opened it. There was no time to preserve their private moment.
Her team members were on their feet the second they
saw her enter the lab.
“Good to see you, Cap. To say it’s been a madhouse
around here is an understatement.” Winters shook his head and looked up from
the screens. “Good to see you, too, Hunter. But, seriously, I think we lost a
coupla jets, even though I can’t confirm it. They got all need-to-know-basis on
me and wouldn’t let any of us into the situation room without you.”
“Do you know what’s going on?” Woods asked, pacing between
Winters’s computers and Clarissa’s medical testing equipment.
“You know we’re locked and loaded, but who can fight
what we can’t see—especially if the brass is keeping us in the dark, ya know?”
Fisher pounded Woods’s fist as he passed him.
“There have been some awful losses,” Clarissa said,
hugging herself. “I can feel it.”
“Was it the Erinyes?” Bradley asked, his worried gaze
falling on Sasha and Hunter and remaining there.
“Okay, okay, people, here’s what’s up,” Sasha said,
moving to the center of the room. “The Seelie are really pissed at having lost
sixty innocent members of their community to an outright butchering by the
Vampires. So they sent in for reinforcements from Europe. Real cowboys—the
Dragon-riding kind.”
“Holy molie,” Winters said, slapping his forehead.
“Are you serious?” Woods just stared at Sasha for a
moment and then shook his head. “Don’t answer that.”
“I wish I wasn’t.” Sasha gave Hunter a sidelong
glance. “The Fae opened up some kind of magick transport portal or whatever
over Lake Pontchartrain tonight to bring their guys in before dawn.”
“Needless to say, it’s going to get hectic come the
dawn.” Hunter glanced around the room. “There will be blood. The two pilots
that went down tonight foolishly fired on a Dragon squadron that was in the
air. That squadron took the action as an invitation to war. Probably the only
reason the rest of the pilots weren’t wiped out was because Sasha had the
foresight to know how the Air Force would respond and asked Garth and Silver
Hawk to try to open a channel of telepathic communication with the Seelie.”
“Is the government aware of the fact that World War
Three is about to happen over the residential district of New Orleans tomorrow
morning?” Bradley wiped his palms down his face.
“Just sayin’. ” Winters looked around the
group. “Because if they came in over the lake, and are hunting highfalutin’
Vampires, they won’t find them in the graveyards anymore. Just a hunch.”
“Right,” Sasha said in a weary tone. “After losing top
viceroys, other VIP Vamps have most likely gone underground beneath their
mansions.”
“Then there’s the clubs,” Winters said, ticking off
possibilities on his fingers. “The casinos. Any Vampire holdings in the
region.”