“You still haven’t answered my question,” he reminded. “You didn’t tell me how you knew I was a werewolf. Did you figure it out all on your own?”
She shrugged and let go of her drink, sinking into the cushion of the booth and tilting her head innocently toward her bare tattooed shoulder as she answered him.
“I knew back in the club. There was something different about you, and it wasn’t that you were dead like a vampire or something, you know.” Her voice was light and conversational as if she was talking about something inconsequential. Nothing could make Cyrus feel better about the course his life had taken.
“I can feel things sometimes, but it’s not a big deal. It’s not as if I’m
psychic
or anything.” She widened her eyes as she’d said the word, making light of the idea as if whatever ability she had was nothing more than an idiosyncratic fluke. She closed her eyes and shook her head. With a wrinkled nose and pursed lips, she opened her eyes again and smiled foolishly. “It’s embarrassing,” she said. “I’ve never told anyone that before.”
Cyrus didn’t doubt for a second that was true. Running as successfully as she had for as long as she had, Sunday probably wasn’t rushing to reveal the truth of her abilities. It was a wonder that she told him this much at all. As much as he didn’t want to seem too incisive, he couldn’t stop himself from probing further.
“So how do vampires feel?”
Sunday squinted and pouted her lips. Her eyes glimmered as they looked into the overhead light, and she considered how to answer.
“Hollow,” she eventually answered, giving herself a moment to replay her response before nodding once sharply. “They’re like a vacuum of space. Everything around them is active and alive, but they’re just empty. Does that make sense?”
“Yeah, it does.” Cyrus grinned. He leaned forward onto his elbows and tucked in his chin a bit so his eyes were level with hers. He inched closer to her over the table, and lowered his voice so she’d strain to hear it from where she sat if she didn’t meet him halfway.
“And how do I feel?” The octave of his voice was low and it hummed in the air between them.
Sunday scooted forward in her seat and tilted her head down. Looking up at him like that, her pupils grew large and the whiskey irises around them became thin halos that glowed beneath the light. Their faces were inches apart, and Cyrus could feel her breath leaving her slightly parted lips and brushing his beard.
“
You
feel…,” she purred, her timbre lower by octaves as well. “There’s an animal in you. Feral. Unhinged. It’s just beneath the surface of your skin, and it wants to snap up and eat me.”
She cocked an eyebrow and a Cheshire grin before winking, slipping back, and slouching against the backrest. Her cheeks flushed and she coyly lifted one shoulder in a half-shrug.
“That’s interesting, Sunday.” He couldn’t help but repeat her name. To call her by it was essential. She was no longer merely the Incarnate.
“So what kinds of things do you do? Tell me about Sunday, Sunday.” He smiled as he threw her questions back at her.
“Ah, well,” she began. “I’m a Scorpio. I like punk rock music and post-punk rock music.” She pointed at her shoulder. “I have tattoos.” Lifting her glass at him, she continued. “I like to drink good craft beers. I like to read books. I like to watch movies, some new and some old,” she clarified. “And it would seem that I like tall, bearded guys who brood. You?”
“That’s fascinating,” Cyrus observed coldly, mimicking her tone. “You are a fascinating woman with very interesting interests.”
“Ah, ah, ah,” she cut in sharply. “I didn’t ask about what you thought about my fascinating and interesting interests. I believe I asked for you to tell me about yourself. That’s how it works, Cyrus,” she patronized. “Girls and boys need to talk about themselves so that they can learn a little bit about each other.”
“Right.” Cyrus nodded slowly and deliberately. He hadn’t flirted like this in a long time, probably decades. The fact that Sunday was such a delightfully difficult woman was engaging.
“My name is Cyrus. I’m a werewolf. I happen to be a tall, bearded, and brooding man.” He winked and blew her a kiss. With exaggerated effect, she grabbed the phantom kiss and balled it up in a fist that she nestled at her heart.
“I travel for work,” he stated more seriously. “My pack… I’m in a pack. We have business contracts around the country, and there’s a lot of legwork involved in keeping the business going. I’m based out of Alaska, but I haven’t really been home for years. Here and again, I get to spend some time there, but never for too long. It’s just me on the road tying up loose ends mostly.”
For a moment, Cyrus found himself thinking back on his home. It was surely covered under a foot of snow, at least. He shared a house with Marcus, another pack member, on what the wolves called “the reservation.” They’d made a home just outside of Healy where all their pack members lived, some with one another, or alone, and others with their families. Though some of the pack had chosen to live in the bigger city, Cyrus and a few others preferred to take up residence on the reservation securely located within miles of forestland.
The Alaska pack had been good to him. Before Stephen had invited him to stay, Cyrus had lived as a lone wolf, sticking mostly to the Southwestern United States. He was from there, after all. Had been born and grown up as a human there until he’d been sixteen when a werewolf attacked him and left him for dead. His body had been strong, though, resilient, and it had fought off death and accepted its curse. Cyrus could pass as a man of thirty to thirty-five years old, but he was older than that by decades. Lycanthropy altered genes and generated cell mutations that doctors found slowed the aging process considerably. Theoretically, a werewolf might be able to die of old age in a couple hundred years, but their lifestyles didn’t lend themselves to longevity. Most died violent deaths at the hands of bounty hunters, other creatures of preternatural origins, or, as in a majority of cases, other werewolves.
Sunday must have noticed his mind wandering into sore memories, because she reached a hand across the table and put his hand in hers. She squeezed lightly, her expression soft.
“I’m sorry,” she said. She spoke just above a whisper, and her tone was gentle and caring. “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”
Cyrus brought his eyes to her, large, brown eyes looking up from under his brow. He laid his other hand over hers and rubbed his thumb over the back of it. He shook his head and smiled at her. They shared a long moment of silence between them.
“You’re incredible,” he finally said. “I don’t know what I expected, but…” His words faded as their eyes continued to linger on one another. “Nothing, Sunday, nothing at all. You’re just incredible.”
They stayed, talking and having drinks until after midnight when she initiated their departure. He’d wanted to stay with her. Talking, not talking, he didn’t care. The pictures and the data he’d collected of the years she’d been his quest paled in comparison to the real deal. Even as she carefully tiptoed around the headline grabbing details of her history, she opened herself up to him, a veritable stranger. Sunday spoke longingly about missing out on high school in favor for homeschooling, which she attributed to a “very religious aunt” who raised her. She talked about her experiences traveling the country and described the values and drawbacks of living in big cities and small towns alike. She expressed real joy at the prospect of finally having a place to call home, and admitted how she simultaneously feared setting roots so deep in Columbia that she wouldn’t be able to leave one day.
It was easy to see how Sunday could seamlessly fall into the lives of the people she encountered over the years, how they could love her and know her, while never really knowing who or what she was. It was almost too easy for Sunday to fall into such sincerity while weaving her web of deceit. Cyrus had to believe that all her years on the road, lying about who she was, had made her a pro. All those interviews with people she’d left along the way could never have established the richness of the person Sunday was when Cyrus got to experience her himself, or the person Sunday wanted him to believe she was.
The more she offered about herself, the more Cyrus had to fight the urge to tell her everything. But he couldn’t. He wouldn’t dare. Not because it would endanger his mission, but because it would mean it would end. Whatever “it” was that was happening to Cyrus would be over. He could deal with the conflict later:
How much of Sunday was real? How much of what he was feeling was real? Could it be that his investment in her was by her design? Was he under the Incarnate’s spell?
As much as he didn’t want to believe it, he had to consider it. But he didn’t want to play that mental game now. Now, all Cyrus wanted to do was live in the moment, and believe that the woman who he was with was the person she was making herself out to be.
“Can I see you again?” she asked.
They were walking to Sunday’s car in the parking lot. Cyrus had offered to walk her to ensure that she’d make it safe. Sunday didn’t miss a beat, however. She chuckled, shrugged, and responded, “Sure. You tell yourself you just want me to get to my car safely. I’ll go on believing you just want to spend a few more seconds with me. Either way, it’s not really a lie. It’s just another version of the truth.”
With her hands in her coat pockets and her teeth chattering from the cold that Cyrus could hardly detect, Sunday turned on her heel as she reached her car.
“So, can we see each other again?” she repeated.
Cyrus hadn’t considered what he would do at the end of the night. That she wanted to exchange numbers and see him again was far beyond his expectation. He was following her, after all, pursuing, and stalking her, contracted to capture and retrieve her.
Tag her and bag her,
as Angel called it. It had been his plan all along to deliver her into the eager hands of the cult.
Anything that could have possibly come of this momentary deviation had no hope of changing that objective. It would happen, whether he liked it or not. If it wasn’t his pack, then someone else would eventually find her. The Pastophori of Iset wanted her, and they wanted her bad.
“Yes.” Just like that single word he had worked so hard to muster in response to her at the club, this yes burned as it came up. It wreaked havoc on every bone in his body as it climbed to his lips. “Yes.”
They exchanged numbers before she got in the car. He stayed, standing there as she drove away, staring out into the horizon well after her car had passed out of view, kicking himself for having ever led his pack to her and put her fate in the hands of the Pastophori of Iset.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Waiting even the twelve-or-so hours between watching her drive off and calling her the next day was the most agonizing, trying time of Cyrus’ life. Within a minute on the phone, Sunday easily put him out of his misery and asked what he was planning for dinner. Cyrus knocked on the door just as she emerged from a shower.
Scavenging for the closest thing she could get into quickly, Sunday pulled a short sun dress over her head and ran to the door. Fresh from the shower, Sunday’s face was still dewy and glistening as she greeted Cyrus. She rubbed the excess water out of her hair as he leaned in for a kiss on the cheek. At the touch of his lips, the warmth from his lips spread from where they connected with her cheek to the soles of her feet. It was more than his werewolf heat that consumed her. He eyed her hungrily, and her skin seared on every part of her body that his eyes brushed over in his assessment.
Cyrus’ gaze fell to her long legs and lingered there. He imagined brushing up her skirt and discovering just how high the tattoos that burst from under the hem of her dangerously short dress went. As he caught himself falling down that rabbit hole of possibility, Cyrus shook his head and returned his hazel eyes to Sunday’s face. Her blush-stained cheeks dimpled with a sly smile.
“I stopped to get us dinner on the way since you didn’t want to go out,” he said, showcasing the box he’d held under his arm. “Who doesn’t like Chinese?”
Sunday was still lavishing in the warmth that his chaste kiss and his none-too-prude evaluation had imbued her with. She showed him in, offered him a seat at the kitchen table, then walked away to replace the towel and slip into some underwear. When she emerged from the room, her damp hair lit into uneven spikes around her head. Cyrus chuckled, and instantly aware of how she must have looked, she blushed and ran back into her room to find a mirror.
“I thought it was cute,” Cyrus called after her, the tenor of his husky voice lifted by the humor behind it.
“Adorable, probably,” she teased as she sauntered back into the living room.
Sunday took her time to get to the kitchen, entertaining the perusal that licked her figure as she moved. He watched intently as she moved around looking for utensils and plates. Unable to restrain himself any longer, the werewolf came up behind her suddenly. He nuzzled into the crook of her neck and fixed his hands onto her hips. She rose on the balls of her feet and drew into him softly, pushing her round bottom into the crotch of his pants. His grip tightened on her hips, and she felt his erection throbbing against her body. A breath caught in her throat. With their bodies so close, she knew that he could feel it. Smiling, he bent his mouth to her ear and purred his satisfaction.
Sunday tilted her face up to Cyrus. Gold flecks shimmered among the receding brown of his irises. Cyrus’ wolf simmered beneath the surface, as he’d grown aroused. Recognizing the wolf made her belly flip and she shifted her weight unconsciously between her legs.
“Tsk, tsk, tsk,” she cautioned with a sultry bedroom voice. Hers was a heavy, lusty gaze. “Your true colors are showing there, wolf.”
Sunday brushed her thumb over the length of his eyebrow, and she swept an errant strand of dark blond hair over his ear. “Calm down before you decide against eating the Chinese food you brought and decide to eat me instead.”
An instinctual rumbling growl was Cyrus’ only response. With a light shove, she urged him to sit back at the table.