Claimed (The Lair of the Wolven 1)

So what are you thinking?

“I’m not.” She cursed when it was clear he wasn’t buying her lie. “Oh, come on. Is my symphath rubbing off on you?”

John Matthew just shrugged. And as he stared at her, she looked down his huge body. He was dressed in black, his skintight T-shirt and his leathers as dark as the shadows he would stalk along in the field as he protected the vampire race from its new enemy.

“I love you,” she said roughly.

Her hellren mouthed a curse. Then signed, Fuck, you’re thinking of going to the Colony, aren’t you.

Darkness abounded, dense and fraught with shadow. O’erwhelming the land as it claimed the souls of the unjust. The earth a vast grave o’er which the dead roamed, searching, searching for all that they had lost …

AS NIGHT FELL in Walters, Lydia was sitting at her kitchen table with a mug of Campbell’s tomato soup between her palms, the old poem rattling through her head in her grandfather’s voice, in her grandfather’s language. The fragments were all that remained in her memory of the full piece, as if the words were fabric that had disintegrated with age.

“Stop it, stop it, stop it …”

As she spoke out loud, she took another sip from the lip of the mug. She tasted nothing, couldn’t have said whether it was hot enough, didn’t know if she had made it with water or milk.

Lies were a sickness, her grandfather had always said. And too many of them could be terminal.

The weight on her chest sure as hell felt like a disease.

Glancing to the window beside the little table, everything outside was dark—and not dark in the way things had been in Boston. Not city-dark. Walters was country-dark, like where she had grown up outside of Seattle, no ambient anything throwing off a glow, no soft, urban-diffused illumination to reassure a person who was jumpy and unhappy that all was not lost. All was not a void that you could fall into.

Especially if you were a sinner. Or if you lied.

“Forgive me, Grandfather,” she whispered.

She put the mug down, finding the normally comforting smell revolting. And as she glanced at the level to see how much she’d actually taken in, the sight of the heavy, viscous red soup was worse.

It reminded her of blood.

Bolting up, she took her sad-sack dinner to the sink and looked away as she rinsed out the mug.

The kitchen had been renovated last in the late eighties, the cabinets a Home Improvement-era mauve, the linoleum floor a pink and blue color scheme that matched. The appliances were black and coordinated with nothing. The sink was stainless steel and matte from use and cleaning.

But none of that was what she dwelled on, and not because she’d gotten used to the Candy-style decor: There was a window over the sink. Another by the table. A third in the door that opened to the detached garage and the backyard.

Her hands shook as she rushed around and pulled the flimsy curtains shut. Then she hustled out of the kitchen, and zeroed in on the stout front door and its dead bolt. As she turned the brass grip and pulled, the catch of the lock in its sturdy metal cage made a clapping sound.

Putting her other hand on top of the first, she bent her knees and leaned all of her weight back. Then she pulled again.

“It’s locked.”

Even as she told herself the obvious, she didn’t believe it. And as she straightened, she wanted to test things again and again, like she could maybe make it all stronger by the repeated challenges.

Spinning around, she fell back against the wood panels and hugged herself.

The house was so small that aside from the kitchen and the parlor she’d just raced through, there was only one other room on the first floor: A study with a desk, a random bean bag chair, and a side table that she’d put her wireless printer on. Given that the home office was on the far side of the stairs, there was absolutely no light carried in from the kitchen.

Stepping over its threshold, she approached the window that faced the backyard with her heart in her throat and her body on a live wire.

Flattening her back against the wall, she took a couple of breaths. Then peered around to look through the wavy antique panes. Like she was taking cover from a shoot-out.

She expected a face to be there, a stranger with evil eyes in a black uniform, returned to do what he’d failed to accomplish in the trees.

Nothing. And as she continued to look out across the scraggly yard, reality seemed to shift on her, the past moving forward and overtaking the present. She had always felt like such a fraud among others, and maybe that was why the lies had been so easy to construct and say out loud to Eastwind. But that didn’t mean any part of it sat well with her.