The Darkest Kiss (Riley Jenson Guardian 6)

"Rhoan rang and said you might need a lift. I wanted to talk to you anyway, so here I am." He glanced down at my arm. "How's the busted shoulder?"

Someone at the Directorate had obviously contacted Rhoan. Jack might be the only one who knew we were brother and sister, but everyone knew we were from the same pack, and living together. And they knew better than to keep injury information from Rhoan - even if he generally knew if I was hurt before they did. "It wasn't busted, just dislocated."

"Ow." He screwed up his nose. "I think that's more painful than a break."

Having had a few breaks in my time, I'd have to disagree. Dislocation might be fucking painful, but so was a busted limb.

"So what do you want to talk about?" I said, as he guided me to the right. "Not that useless brother of mine again, I hope. You know I have little influence over him."

Liander smiled. "Your useless brother has been rather well behaved of late. No complaints, either in or out of the bedroom."

For which I was glad. The last couple of years had been pretty rough for Liander when it came to the relationship between him and my brother, and he deserved some good times for a change. "So what's the problem?"

He unlocked the door of his old Ford, then said, "You remember that name you mentioned? The one I said sounded familiar?"

"Aron Young?"

"Yeah. I remembered where I knew it from." He motioned me to sit, so I did. He slammed the door shut, then ran around to the driver's side and climbed in. After starting up the car, he added, "I've got pictures at home, if you'd like to see if it's the same man."

"I would, but I need to pick up my car from Glenroy, first." I gave him the street name, then shifted in the seat so that I was facing him and said, "So tell me all."

"He was briefly in the same school as me." He glanced in the rearview mirror, then pulled out into the traffic. "Tenth grade, at Beechworth Secondary College."

I raised my eyebrows. "You went to a state school?"

He nodded. "The Moore pack was a small one, and we certainly couldn't afford to set up our own private school. The cost of building and hiring teachers was just too much."

"And the local community didn't mind?" While wolves and other supernaturals might have become an accepted - even if sometimes not liked - part of city living, there were still pockets in country areas that preferred to keep their towns as free as possible from the nonhuman "taint."

A task that was harder in the alpine areas, simply because there were so many wolf packs up there. Mountains were a good place to run free and wild.

"Unlike some of the packs around, the Moores were well integrated into the local community." He shrugged. "We did community stuff, Dad coached the local football team, and Mom was heavily involved in church fetes. People forgot what we were, to a great extent."

"Sounds like it was a nice place to grow up." Better than what Rhoan and I had, anyway. But then, that wouldn't have been hard.

"It was." He gave me a quick smile, then added, "Anyway, Young transferred into our school at the start of tenth grade. He was there long enough for the school photos, but disappeared a month or so before the end of the year."

"Was he pulled out or suspended?"

"Neither. He actually disappeared." He pulled to a halt at a red light and glanced at me. "There were rumors, of course. He got mixed up with some pretty bad elements, and there was talk he'd been involved in some sort of initiation gone wrong."

"Was he human?"

"Shifter. Some sort of bird." He shrugged. "I never had much to do with him, so I really couldn't say for sure."

At least that explained how he'd disappeared on me the night I'd chased him from Vinny's. When a nonhuman became a vampire, they took whatever shifting skill they had into unlife. But if he could shift shape, why didn't he simply fly from the building from the very start? Hell, if he could disappear, why hadn't he simply done that rather than run? "Did the police investigate the disappearance?"

"Yeah. No charges were ever brought, and a body was never found. If something did happen, it was well covered up by everyone involved."

"What about his parents?"

He raised his eyebrows. "What about them?"

"How did they react to their son going missing?"

"From what I remember, furiously. But about a month after the disappearance, they picked up stakes and left town. We never saw them again."

"And there were no whispers around town about why they might have left?"