Instead she decided to enjoy the moment. She’d wanted badly to come to this cookout, to be included in the normalcy of friends on a Sunday afternoon, just this once.
As night settled over the deck, crowded with folding chairs and plastic-covered tables, a light breeze began to blow. Kalina sat at the table with Mel, Pete, and Stephen.
Lifting to her lips the soda she’d grabbed in exchange for the beer she couldn’t quite stomach, she took a sip. The cool liquid slid over her tongue and down her throat with a gentle motion. She let the taste of lime mingle in her mouth and was just about to say something when she heard it.
A moan, or a groan, or something akin to an animal sound. She looked around, but it didn’t appear that anyone else had heard it. Maybe one of the neighbors had a big-ass dog that could growl that deeply. Somehow Kalina really didn’t think that was the case.
Her body tensed as she sat up straighter in her chair. The sound came again, this time closer, and she wished she’d figured out a way to squeeze the 9mm in her glove compartment into her super-small purse. There was danger, that feeling she knew well as it gripped her insides, sending quick messages to her brain to be on alert. She’d always had this kind of intuition, these feelings that she knew were different from anything anyone around her felt. Right beside her the conversation between Melanie and her guests moved with casual ease, but Kalina’s ears tuned that out, pushed it to the far recesses of her mind. In return she homed in on the sound of whatever was coming, waiting so she could react.
It was the strangest thing, a sense of déjà vu so strong she felt dizzy with it. She would have to fight; her fingers tingled with the notion. But who? She was at a cookout for crying out loud, who the hell was she gonna fight? The brother-in-law who came over thinking he’d been hooked up? The dad who burned her hamburger?
It didn’t make sense.
But at the end of the yard where fat bushes lined the tall tiers of the privacy fence she saw a movement. Just a shadow, but definitely movement. Instinctively she stood, her eyes narrowing, focusing on that spot.
“Hey, you need something?” Stephen asked, already at her side.
“Ah, no. I um, I just need the bathroom,” she replied. “Be right back.”
And then she was gone, slipping through the back door into the kitchen. Walking swiftly through the rooms, Kalina searched for the basement door. It was there, along the foyer wall. She headed down the steps, hearing the blare of what she thought was the SpongeBob SquarePants theme music. At the bottom of the steps, she looked to her left into the room that was carpeted and paneled and again filled with furniture, including a big flat-screen television. Matthew was lounging on the couch and Madison sound asleep on the love seat across from him.
Tiptoeing past the doorway, she entered what was obviously the laundry room: cement floor, washer and dryer, clothes hanging or folded all about. But none of that mattered; the feeling that something was out there taunted her. There was another door and Kalina quickly opened it, grabbing a baseball bat she’d spied in the corner of the laundry room beforehand.
Slipping out into the night, she recognized that the adults were still talking and drinking just above her on the deck. She moved slowly, hoping their beer-muddled minds wouldn’t see her creeping across the elongated length of the yard. Using the cloak of darkness and the dense line of bushes, Kalina moved deeper and deeper into the yard until a sound had her stopping.
It wasn’t a groan this time, more like a chuffing she knew was animal-like because she’d heard it before. Last night and that night long ago. Still, Kalina prayed she was wrong. What she thought she’d seen didn’t exist. Moving closer to the bushes, she let that thought play in her mind.
Through the bushes there was a flash of light. Green. Two orbs of green. Eyes?
Her heart pounded in her chest as recognition beat into her brain.
She paused, unable to move another inch.
Eyes in the bushes.
There was a sound behind her and she flinched, turning quickly with the raised bat in hand. What came at her was large and moved fast. But she was faster, swinging until the bat connected with a loud thunk. She would have hit it again or at the very least moved closer to verify what “it” was, but she was grabbed from behind.
A hand went over her mouth, another around her waist, pulling her into the bushes she’d thought were her shield.
Kalina struggled, but it was futile as whoever had grabbed her moved quickly. The privacy fence gave way, probably the opening where the trash cans were lined. But there was almost no sound—or maybe they were moving too fast. She felt wind whipping over her skin as if they were traveling at a high rate of speed.
The chuffing grew louder, into a sick-sounding mewl. But her captor kept moving and moving until she was being thrown into the back of a truck.
“Go!” a man’s voice yelled.
The truck pulled off, wheels screeching along the asphalt.
Kalina rolled over on the leather-covered seat, turning until she stared into eyes that freaked her out more than the green ones she’d seen in the bushes. They were gold, like flecks of the sun dropped into the face of a man with skin the color of night.
Now she really wished she had her gun.
Chapter 14
Umberto Alamar walked slowly off the private jet to the waiting black SUV. A different type of breeze hit his exposed skin, a scent of untamed and dangerous land tickling his nostrils. Approaching the open door of the vehicle, he unbuttoned the two buttons of the suit jacket and stepped inside.
Human clothes, he thought, itched like the devil.
The interior of the vehicle was dark and he was alone, as he was most of the time. As he had been most of his adult life. Save for the three years his jaguar mother had stayed with him, Umberto had been parentless, taken in by the females of the tribe, trained by the males to become the leader he was today. One would think at fifty-two years old he would have found some sort of solace in the life that had been chosen for him before he’d taken an initial breath.
But he hadn’t.
He was where he was supposed to be, doing the job that was destined to be his. But it wasn’t enough. He knew this just as he’d known three days ago that this trip to the States was imminent.
Things were changing, long-ago rules were proving deficient in this new battle that approached. And it was on foreign ground that the first spoils of this war would lie.
With a heavy sigh he sat back on the seat, wondering how they’d come to be in this position, knowing instinctively that it would not only be up to him to bring them out.
X greeted the Elder, holding open the door to the SUV that had brought him from the private landing strip in Virginia owned by the Shadow Shifters but titled to a couple of fake stockholders in Rome and Nick’s law firm. With appropriate respect and honor he bowed and waited as the Elder stepped from the vehicle and stayed in that position until a heavy hand clapped onto his shoulder, granting permission for him to do otherwise.
He’d received word from the Assembly just an hour ago that Elder Alamar was arriving. He’d also been told to keep the arrival time and place a secret, until otherwise notified.
X did as he was told.
Usually.
Tonight was one of those off times that he listened to one of the Elders and kept his mouth shut about the arrival of Alamar. He did this for two reasons. First, he’d been instructed to take Alamar to Rome’s house. This meant he wasn’t keeping anything from his friend and Faction Leader. And two, it was either leave his apartment to pick up the Elder or sit there and let the walls close in around him, choking the last remnants of life out of him.