A crack of gunfire rent the silence of the night.
Corinne jolted. The sudden explosion of bright orange went up near the front of the cabin as the noise ricocheted off the trees like a thunderclap.
"Oh, my God. Hunter ..."
Before she could stop herself, she was climbing out of the truck, running toward the cabin up ahead. She had no plan once she got there, except to search for some reassurance that Hunter was unharmed. Invincible as he seemed, he held her heart in his hands, and there was nothing that could have stopped her from going after him now.
She smelled the tang of spent gunpowder as she neared the front porch of the cabin. A dead man sprawled there, a long rifle smoking from its barrel where it lay across his chest. His face was frozen in a rictus of startled alarm, his neck snapped efficiently to the side. Hunter.
He'd been through here.
He was somewhere inside the cabin.
Corinne crept inside carefully. Immediately, she heard the sounds of a struggle taking place beneath her. The basement. She found the stairwell door leading toward the disturbance below, and in the instant she debated the idiocy of going down there, the painted wood panel appeared to spontaneously explode from within.
The force of it knocked her back against the wall behind her. When she opened her eyes after the shock, she found herself staring into a gaze that matched her own - greenish blue irises ringed by dark lashes and catlike, almond-shaped lids. The eyes looked back at her from out of the face of a boy. A lean, muscular boy about five foot seven, his lovely face still round at the jaw with the last traces of childhood.
But he was no boy, she realized. He was dressed in gray drawstring sweatpants and a white tank top, despite the night's chill. His head was shaved bald, his skin covered in dermaglyphs. A terrible-looking, thick black collar circled his neck.
"Nathan," she gasped.
The instant turned into a moment as he cocked his head at her, no expression on his face. No recognition at all.
And the brief hesitation cost him, because now Hunter was in the room with them as well. He'd moved faster than Corinne could follow, seeming to materialize out of thin air as he came up behind Nathan.
The boy's senses were as quick as his reflexes. He faced off against Hunter. Then, moving with the same impossible speed as the larger male, Nathan put his hand out and Corinne saw that he'd removed a long, thin iron from the set of fireplace tools near the potbellied stove several feet away.
Instead of using the iron as a weapon, the boy cracked it into the metal exhaust pipe of the stove.
The answering clang reverberated through the whole cabin. Then it began to rise, to expand. She felt Nathan's power - her own power, passed down to her child through his birth - as he warped the sound waves with his mind and sent them higher, coaxing them toward a deafening racket.
She'd had no doubt this boy was hers, but now, the rush of relief and rejoice poured over her. This was her son. This was her Nathan.
And this boy - this dangerous young Breed male - was gathering his psychic power, pushing the full force of it on Hunter now, attempting to drive his opponent to his knees. Hunter's jaw was held tight, tendons standing out like cables in his neck and cheeks as the aural onslaught intensified.
"Nathan, stop!" Corinne shouted, but her voice was lost under the piercing shriek of her son's talent. She tried to douse it with her own ability, but his command of the gift was too powerful. She couldn't silence it.
Amid the cacophony he'd created, he launched himself at Hunter, murder gleaming darkly in his merciless eyes. He swung the fireplace iron at him in a rapid series of blows, any one of which might have cracked open Hunter's skull had he not moved to deflect it. And that's all he was doing, Corinne realized. Hunter delivered no strikes of his own, though he could have taken down the smaller male in an instant. Could have killed him at any moment, if that had been his intent.
But Hunter only defended, like a seasoned alpha lion patiently batting away the scrappy cub who sought to test his mettle. This was far more dangerous than play; Corinne knew better than to think it anything less. Hunter knew it too, and yet despite the aggression being dealt to him, he made no move to inflict harm.
In that moment, Corinne had never loved him more.
Nathan kept coming at him, relentless and calculating, just as his training had conditioned him to be. Corinne reached once more for a grasp on the din he'd conjured. She gathered her mind around it, tried to bunch the noise into a kinetic tool of her own. She caught a glimpse of Nathan landing a blow of the long iron against Hunter's shoulder. Oh, God. She would die if either one of them failed to walk away from this. Focus.
She willed herself to concentrate on the noise she was shaping, pulling it slowly away from Nathan's control while his efforts were trained on killing Hunter. Corinne drew the din into a power of her own.
She gathered and shaped it ... then heaved its psychic bulk at her son. His head came up sharply. He threw a glower on her, confusion and surprise flickering behind the grim purpose in his gaze. She could read the question in his teenage eyes. Who are you?>Dragos grunted, resenting all of these panicked humans almost as much as he despised the bastard from the Order who'd managed to derail months of work with a single gunshot. It was pride more than pain that drew his mouth into a tight line, fury more than fear that had him gritting his teeth so hard behind his lips it was a wonder his jaw didn't shatter. His fangs throbbed, already ripping out of his gums and filling his mouth. His sight, always preternaturally sharp, was growing even more acute now, the edges of his vision filling with amber light. He had to get out of there, and fast.
Before his rage betrayed him publicly for what he truly was.
Dragos glanced over at one of the attending cops - the younger of the pair. The one who belonged to him. Crouched beside Dragos, the Minion awaited his command like an eager hound.
"Tell my driver to bring the car around back," he murmured, his voice hardly more than a whisper. The Minion leaned close, absorbing every word. "And do something to clear this goddamn room of all these prying eyes."
"Yes, Master."
The Minion rose. When he pivoted to carry out the order, he nearly ran headlong into Tavia Fairchild. She stood there, unmoving, her shrewd gaze flicking from the cop who'd almost run her down to Dragos, who looked up at her in rapt but cautious interest. Although she could only have been there for an instant, it had been long enough. She'd heard the Minion address Dragos as his master. He could tell by the slight tilt of her head, the faint narrowing of her eyes, that she was trying to process information that even her keen mind didn't have the basis to comprehend.