“If you think I’m going to let you out of my sight,” Cyrus retorted through clenched jaw and with an ever-looming glare, “then you’re seriously mistaken.”
“We’ve got to hit it,” Marcus shouted. Even though she couldn’t hear them yet, sirens blared in the distance, and police cars were nearing the accident site.
“I’m not getting in your truck, wolf,” Sunday snapped at Marcus.
“That’s fine,” Cyrus answered. “I’ll go with you. Marcus, drive to the motel. We’re right behind you.”
Taking his cue, Marcus immediately shut the passenger door and jogged to the driver’s side where he promptly got in. Without a moment’s hesitation, he drove off into the cross street. Sunday remained bound by Cyrus’ strong hands and impossibly solid grip.
“I’m not going anywhere with you,” she shouted through grinding molars and flared nostrils.
“You need to. You need information on Constance and we have it. You want to know where she is and I’ll tell you.”
“You’re not taking me anywhere,” she snapped, pounding her foot into the pavement.
“You listen to me, Sunday,” Cyrus began. “No one, and I repeat,
no one
, is taking you anywhere without your consent. Do you understand?”
Cyrus paused and took a step closer into Sunday so that she could feel the heat of his body an inch from hers. He was forcing her to understand the gravity of what he was saying, the meaning of it. Heat rolled over his body as Sunday’s skin tingled.
“I swear to you, Sunday… and I’ll let you fiddle with my brain and figure it out for yourself once we’re off this street… that no one, not me, and not anyone else, is going to take you anywhere you don’t want to go ever again. Are we clear?”
Sunday heard the sirens approaching now. Ultimately, she had no choice. If Cyrus was telling her the truth, then he had a team of wolves working on this thing with Constance. She needed every bit of information they had, and if she played her cards right, she could get them to help her. Cyrus’ hands dropped from her shoulders as her body eased. She bit her lip and looked sideways out of the corner of her eyes. She was relenting.
Without another word between them, Cyrus walked to the passenger door and opened it. Sunday waited until he’d closed it to get behind the wheel. They drove off in the direction the other werewolf had taken.
Neal entered the motel room to find the Incarnate lying on one of the beds, reviewing the police report on the murder at Bearers of Mystical Fruit. Her knee-high knit socks gathered loosely along her shins while a pair of unlaced, black combat boots that had seen better days lay on opposite sides of the room. An hour earlier, Sunday had ripped off her boots and launched one at Marcus and the other at Cyrus. She didn’t even look up when Neal had arrived. Instead, she’d grunted and forced her attention to reading the reports. Her face twisted in a scowl, and she turned each page forcibly.
At the table under the window, Marcus and Cyrus sat with a laptop between them trying to learn as much as possible about Malay black magic. It was evident to Neal that the woman wasn’t happy to be there. The way that Cyrus described the situation, the Incarnate had argued against going with them. After a short briefing by on the werewolves’ findings on Constance, she refused to talk to either man. She told them to learn about Malay witchcraft and set about ignoring them.
It was after nine o’clock and Neal had ridden a taxi to the hotel while Angel stayed tailing Constance. Every few minutes, Angel called with updates on her whereabouts and activities. Neal stood at the end of the bed on which Sunday lay. He stood akimbo and puffed his chest, maintaining a grim expression as he glowered at her. Ignoring him, Sunday flipped another page of the report to one that contained a detailed description of the victim’s wounds. After a minute of his staring, Sunday clapped the file shut and crossed her arms over her chest.
“This one’s threatening me. Anyone gonna stop him?” she asked.
“So this is the Incarnate, eh?” Neal finally said. “She’s nothing but a brat with a bad attitude.”
Sunday slowly raised her gaze to meet Neal’s, letting him know that she was neither afraid of nor amused by his posturing. Setting the papers aside, she pushed up on the bed and sat. Tilting her head to the side and grinning, she inspected him top-to-bottom. He was a big one, the biggest of the three werewolves, and certainly bigger than Sunday, but he wasn’t fooling her. He was afraid, and his natural warrior’s response to fear was assuming control and staring down the threat.
“Listen, wolf,” she started coldly. “I’m letting you all keep me here because you’ve got information that I need to take down this cold-hearted black magic witch. The minute you become a thorn in my side, you’re done.” With her eyes locked on Neal’s, she tipped her chin gesturing to Cyrus. “You have a doubt about that, you ask your friend over there. There’s another one of you missing in action right now that you could ask, too.”
“Cut it out,” Cyrus interrupted.
“He started it,” Sunday quickly retorted.
“I wasn’t talking to you.” Cyrus narrowed his eyes at Neal threatening him to back down. “Have you been able to track down the vamps from the club?”
“Negative, sir,” Neal replied. Cyrus sighed in defeat wishing the news had been different. “You’re sure the vamps were tourists?” Neal asked him.
“Not anymore,” Cyrus admitted.
This was the first time Sunday had heard any of the wolves mention the vampire couple at the club. Sunday had encountered them over the past few months lurking at the Lair. She had noticed them then and carefully avoided them. From their demeanor, she assessed that they weren’t immediate threats to the humans around them. All of the madness surrounding the days since she’d last seen them had made her forget they had even been there that night, the night she first ran into Cyrus.
“They’re either tourists, or they’ve only just arrived,” Sunday responded, finally showing some interest in interacting with the werewolves. All eyes fell on her when she’d made the revelation.
“You know those two bastards?” Cyrus asked, his voice aggressive and scolding.
“I didn’t say any of that, sunshine,” she bit back. “I’ve seen them before a handful of times, but not any earlier than, say, June or July, and I never see them outside a club. It’s not like nests to pick up older vampires that aren’t already part of the family, is it?”
“How do you know that?” Neal asked.
“Don’t you know what I used to do for a living? It was my
job
to know those kinds of things.”
“Do you know where they’ll be?” Marcus interjected. “A club they might be going to tonight?”
Sunday laughed humorlessly as she through her head back and sighed. The werewolves were so much more clueless than she’d imagined. If they needed to track down a couple of vampires that at least one of them had gotten a good look at, then she didn’t need to
guess
where they were going to be. Maybe was the reason that they hadn’t found her sooner. Evidently, none of them had consulted with witches, or at least, they hadn’t consulted with really skilled, really clever ones. They could have easily pinpointed the vampires’ locations by casting a spell.
“I’m gonna need a map, boys. And you, Cyrus, you’re going to have to start meditating on those boys’ faces until you can get a really clear view of them.” She looked around at the men, all growing more confused by the second. “Anyone got matches?”
It took fifteen minutes for Marcus to return from the corner gas station with a driving map of Columbia and four books of matches. Before she began the spell, she made the werewolves promise, with the threat of death if they didn’t keep it, to let her break in to Constance’s warehouse while the others followed her directions to the tourist vampires. Cyrus insisted that he would accompany her, and in spite of her mounting suspicions of him, she agreed.
The ritual lasted all of four minutes. Sunday laid the map facing down on the carpet as she kneeled over it. She instructed Cyrus to close his eyes until he could fix a perfect picture of the vampires’ visages in his mind. Taking his hands, she laid them over the paper and held them down with one of her own. Her consciousness bled into Cyrus until she could see the images in his mind clearly. Then, she recited a simple spell in a language that none of the wolves understood. She waited a few seconds after she finished, and rolled her weight back onto her heels. Releasing Cyrus’ hand, she asked him to take his hands off the map.
“Is that it?” Marcus asked. His expression was pinched, and his hands balled into fists at his hips.
“Are you serious?” Sunday quipped. “I just performed some grade school spell casting that none of you doofuses had managed to conjure up and I found you some vampires and you’re asking if that’s
it
?”
“I don’t see shit, lady,” Neal barked.
“Whatever.” Sunday rolled her eyes, and she grabbed the map off the floor. She crumbled the paper in her hand and tossed it to Cyrus.
“Burn it. It’s gonna catch fire real fast, so you better get rid of it quick.”
Cyrus’ brows gathered in question and he looked up to his brothers. They all shrugged, and Neal took a book of matches and tossed it to Cyrus. He struck a match and held it to an edge of the paper. Instantly, the wad ignited, and Cyrus fell back in shock as he threw it into the air. The other two werewolves leaped in unison. Ashes fell from the fireball as it fell to the floor. A section of the map no larger than a dollar bill remained as the flames shrank and extinguished. The edges of the paper were singed to a crisp.
“What the hell was that?” Marcus balked. He lowered himself to his knees beside Cyrus, and knelt to examine the charred paper.
“That was witchcraft,” Sunday answered smartly, holding her head high and cocking an eyebrow. She picked up what remained of the map off the floor and held it up so that all of them could see it. “This is where you’ll find the vamps you were picturing,” she said. She handed it to Cyrus, and got to her feet.
“Now,” Sunday stated firmly, “you’re taking me to the warehouse.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The city streets were abandoned this late on a weeknight. As Cyrus and Sunday made their way to Congaree Vista, the streetlights flashed, painting the darkened streets red and yellow intermittently. Dread loomed in the shadows. Nothing good lay ahead of them as they neared their destination. Dark magic, with all its malicious intent and the cruelty of its design, was a difficult thing for Sunday to willingly or eagerly confront. The ambiguity of what Constance was cooking only made the situation more dangerous. Not knowing exactly what to expect meant Sunday had to be prepared for anything.
It was everything Sunday thought she’d left behind when she’d destroyed Bernadette and fled, living in secret for all these years. Confronting wayward ambitious witches and creatures had been the ways of her past. Under Bernadette, Sunday had been an enforcer. At the witch’s side, she’d known what it was like to be feared. She’d known what it was like to be drunk with power. This was all the story of the Incarnate’s past, and it was fast becoming the story of her near future. As much as she never wanted to do it again, she would, however, because, whether or not they knew it, her friends depended on it. Sammy and Kayla had no idea what they’d walked into. One of the witches in their friendly coven sisterhood was a murderer. When it came to witches, mundane murders were a sign of something much more sinister in store.
The temperature had dipped into the low fifties, and Sunday tucked herself in a thick striped scarf and puffy jacket. Sunday sat in the passenger seat, knees pressed to her chest, while Cyrus drove them. Since they’d gotten in the car back at the motel, they hadn’t said a word to one another. Cyrus’ eyes stared at the road ahead with fixed eyes and a heavy brow. Sunday did the same. All the while, Sunday tried to ignore the frigid air and worked on her meditations. But the more she tried to ignore the elephant in the room, the louder it bellowed.
“Did you know the whole time?” Sunday asked. Her voice was taut and her throat seized as she’d spoken. She forced herself to keep staring straight ahead and not to Cyrus, but she shot glances out of the corner of her eye, watching for his reaction.
As they’d driven, the reality of their situation finally hit her. The man she had grown affectionate for and was still strongly attracted to was a liar. He had conned her into falling for him, and he was conning her again. This time he was manipulating to comply with a truce so that he and his packmates could help her figure out what Constance was plotting. She didn’t want to believe that she had been so completely fooled by him in the time they’d spent together. Her inability to detect the threat was just as hard to swallow his betrayal. At the end of this affair, she would be short the only two real friends she ever had
and
a blossoming relationship with Cyrus. A normal life wasn’t in the cards for her, as if she’d needed some black magic brouhaha and a murder to remind her!
When Cyrus didn’t answer, she turned to face him and asked again.
“Did you
always
know?” she asked again. Her voice cracked.
“Yes,” Cyrus answered shortly, eyes fixed to the dark road ahead and body like a statue. “I’ve known who you are for longer than you can remember. I kidnapped you with Angel and Stephen, our pack Alpha, and I took you to Bernadette.”
“There’s more that you’re not telling me. I don’t have to be a psychic to know it,” she said, crossing her arms over her chest and holding her body tense.
Cyrus shot her a quick look before looking back to the road. This was his chance to absolve himself of the torch he’d been carrying for so long. The truth bubbled in his chest aching for release. He drew in a long, deep breath through his nose and let her scent stew in his chest. When he exhaled, he looked over his shoulder at Sunday again. His gaze sliced over her face, examining her. He shook his head and looked away again.
He didn’t know how much he could tell her, but he knew he couldn’t continue lying. After all she’d been through in her life, and now knowing that she’d been so burdened by the running, he couldn’t just let her go on feeling trapped. She was, after all, so much more than some magical, hallowed trophy to him. She’d
become
so much more than that to him.