“Please, Shiarra.”
I raised my eyes to his, meeting his gaze with difficulty. The words were forced, and they hurt, but they were mine. “No, Royce. No.”
I took another step back. It wasn’t getting any easier.
“At least tell me why. What you’re looking for.”
I bit my lower lip, tasting the remnants of him there, a ghost of him left behind on my skin. “Redemption. I won’t find it with you.”
He said nothing.
“If I live ... I promise, if I survive this, I’ll come back. I swear it.”
‘You won’t. You’re only making that promise because you know you can’t keep it.’
What the belt said might have been true, but my words seemed to satisfy Royce anyway. He nodded, melting back into the shadows. “I’ll wait for you, Ms. Waynest. But my patience isn’t endless.”
Whether that was a threat or a simple word of caution, I didn’t feel up to analyzing it any more deeply. He’d said it before, and I had no doubt I’d give him reason to say it again before this was all over. Without another word, I spun on my heel and took off, running the rest of the way through a blurred haze of shame and regret.
Bo was waiting by the car, as I’d thought, and furious with me when I returned.
“Where the hell did you go? What were you thinking?”
I flushed as he glared at me, feeling more like an errant kid than a grown woman. The belt chattered mocking laughter and insults in the back of my mind, not helping matters. With a few hissing breaths taken between my teeth to collect myself, I affected a much lighter demeanor than I was feeling.
“Sorry, Bo,” I said, flinching when he reached for me. His expression hardened. Jesus, I hoped he couldn’t smell the vampire on me.
I forced myself to stillness as he pulled a twig complete with attached sugar maple leaf from my hair. The heat in my cheeks grew with the mounting disapproval in his eyes. Were my lips still red from the kiss?
“That was the girl who Chaz was boinking on the side,” I chattered lamely, rubbing the back of my neck. Could he tell what else I’d been doing? “She’s a Sunstriker. I didn’t want to let her get away. ”
He frowned at me. “Did she hurt you? What happened?”
“No. We did fight a little. I’m fine, but she escaped.” That nagging pang of hunger reared its head again, and I gave him a hopeful look. “Hey, you don’t have any chocolate in the car, do you?”
Some of his anger and tension melted away. He put an arm around my shoulder, hugging me to him. The belt made a gagging sound that made me heartily wish it had some kind of physical form so I could forcibly shut it up.
“No, I don’t have any sweets with me. Look, kiddo, I’m supposed to be your bodyguard when you’re out on the town. I can’t do much for you if you run off like that. Stay close next time, okay?”
As much as I hated being called “kiddo,” I didn’t want to antagonize Bo any more than I already had. “I will. Really, I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.” I held up the USB drive. “Hey, at least I’ve got something to show for it. Let’s head back so Keith can find out what’s on this thing.”
He gave the flash drive a dismissive glance. Clearly he wasn’t well versed in electronic devices or their uses. The tiny piece of plastic and metal might not look like much, but it could potentially have hundreds or even thousands of files on it that could help in my search for the Sunstrikers. Since Chaz hadn’t shown up to retrieve it himself, presumably sending Kimberly in his stead, I didn’t want to get my hopes up too high—but there was still a chance it contained something useful.
I only prayed that refusing the vampire for the sake of staying with the hunters was worth it. Staring out the window at the passing traffic through the blur of tears, it was only then that I realized I had never asked Royce what had happened to Sara.
Chapter 13
(Days left to full moon: 10)
Panic was setting in. Days had passed, but I had yet to find Chaz. Hawk hadn’t sent me any replies since his last message, even though I’d sent a few follow-ups. Jack and Nikki were pissed at me for trying to hunt by myself, and at Bo for losing me in the city. Bo was still pissed at me for ruining his sweater and running off. And Keith wasn’t being very helpful about the USB.
Keith wasn’t being that way on purpose. He’d been assigned to some other duty by Jack and couldn’t devote much time to me. Though I couldn’t imagine what was more pressing than the need to find Chaz before the full moon, it was taking up a great deal of Keith’s attention. He’d opened up the USB, only to give the thoroughly disappointing news that it included copies of invoices, some tax documents, and a host of pictures of Chaz in ... shall we say... “compromising” circumstances.
It appeared Kimberly wasn’t the only one who had been on the receiving end of Chaz’s attentions. Even though I hadn’t been wearing the belt, it was a good thing Patrick had been around when Keith unlocked the encryption on the disk. Patrick had to put me in a headlock so I couldn’t destroy a second computer in my rampage.
Now that I thought about it, that might have had something to do with why Keith wasn’t in a mood to help me lately.
After I’d bugged him a number of times, he’d given me a laptop to use, warning me not to break this one and to stay out of my own e-mail accounts so authorities couldn’t track my IP address. I already knew better than to do something that stupid, but I let him lecture me on Internet security for about half an hour (tuning out most of it, to be honest) and then snatched up the laptop and took it back to my room.
There were a number of things I wanted to do, but first I went through the USB drive a second time. A few times, I dug my fingernails into my palms hard enough to make them bleed, but I went through every file, including the pictures.
If I hadn’t wanted to kill him before, the images of him with all those other girls now guaranteed I’d rip his nuts off and feed them to him when I found him. He might have been dating me, but it was now obvious that Kimberly wasn’t the only girl he’d been plowing on the side. Each was sorted by date and a name. There were pictures of him and I together, but what killed me were the ones he’d taken of himself with four other women—not including Kimberly—tagged with dates during times that we had still been a couple. Some from before I’d even known he was Were. He must have been storing the flash drive at work so I would never find these photos. No wonder he was always so “busy.”
The only bright side to any of it was pay dirt in the form of pictures that matched up with some things on his tax return from 2006. He’d somehow come up with the collateral and purchased a piece of property somewhere on Long Island, another plot of land in Buffalo, and another one just outside of some town in the Hudson Highlands. If I recalled correctly, that was right around the time he’d told me he’d become the pack leader of the Sunstrikers. Maybe that meant he’d inherited the lands from the previous pack leader or that his new position came with some financial perks; I doubted he had the kind of money or credit to buy those properties on his own. The addresses were worth checking out, if only because he could be hiding at one of those locations. It was the only good news I’d come across in days. Which was good, because I was running out of time to hunt.
Rohrik Donovan had warned me about the symptoms of the virus taking root. The words he’d spoken were practically seared into my brain.
“Without blood tests, you won’t know for sure right away. Symptoms don’t usually appear until seven to ten days before the next full moon. You’ll crave rare or uncooked meat. You’ll find your temper snapping at things that at any other time would be insignificant. Some environmental triggers, mostly scents, may make you feel nauseous or uncomfortable. As it gets closer to the full moon, you’ll develop a sensitivity to loud noises and may run a fever. Bright lights will hurt your eyes. The first change is painful and disorienting, so don’t wait to contact me if you start showing symptoms. Too much stress, and you might change before it’s time.”