Ecstasy Untamed (Feral Warriors #6)(2)

He lifted a single brow. "I've been sleeping in the dining room?"

Lyon clapped him warmly on the back. "The Shaman recommended we keep you within the heart of the house and activity. We'd hoped our voices would eventually pull you back."

His gaze shifted to the wall of windows beyond the long table and the woods behind the house. The trees had leaves, but the leaves were thin and still the bright green of spring. "How long?"

"It's been two weeks since you fell into that trap," Lyon told him. "A week since we got you out."

Hawke's gaze swung to Kougar. "How? No one escapes a spirit trap." Somehow he knew his escape was Kougar's doing.

"Long story."

Hawke's gaze shifted to Tighe. "Did I imagine you went down with me?"

The haunted look that entered his friend's eyes was answer enough. "Delaney kept me tethered as best she could, but it was close, Wings. It was close." The shadows evaporated, a look of pure joy taking their place. "We're going to have a son."

Hawke blinked. "You're going to be a father?"

"Again." Tighe's gaze momentarily unfocused as if he were pulled by a distant memory. "Finally." Tighe shook his head with a grin, clasping Kougar on the shoulder. "I'll let Kougar share his own news. Oh, and the new fox shifter should be here by the end of the week. He's flying in from Poland."

Hawke laughed, the sound little more than a rough burst of air. "I'm beginning to feel like Rip Van Winkle." The man of human legend had supposedly fallen asleep for a hundred years and awoken to find that the world had passed him by. "We're going to be nine once more? No one's . . . been lost?"

"No one's been lost." Lyon rose to his feet but continued to watch him with a small smile and eyes filled with deep relief. "We'll be nine again soon. And it's a good thing. We've detected some strange activity in the Daemon layer of the earth's energy. We don't know what it means yet, but it can't bode well. The Mage are clearly trying yet another way to free the Daemons."

The anger, so temporarily banked inside him, sparked, then flared. The damned Mage. Daemons would rampage and torture, terrorize and kill, destroying life by the thousands - humans and immortals alike.

His fangs dropped, his claws erupting. He snarled. "Those f**king idiots."

"Hawke, easy buddy."

But Tighe's entreaty sank beneath the rising roar in his head as his frustration exploded into fury, erupting into a firestorm of rage. Pulling him under.

Drowning him, once more, in darkness.

"Hawke!" Lyon tried to hold his friend, but it was too late. Reason had fled Hawke's eyes, replaced with a snarling, spitting anger. "Hold him down!" he ordered even as Hawke lashed out with his claws.

But as the three men tried to contain the thrashing, violent warrior, Hawke shifted into his animal in a spray of colored lights. As one, they pulled back. "Kkkeeeeer." The red-tailed hawk took off on a wild flight through the dining room, flying at the windows, crashing through the glass.

Kougar ran for the window. Lyon followed, certain the bird had shredded his wings. But if Hawke had done himself any damage, Lyon couldn't tell. The hawk soared above the treetops and disappeared. When the Ferals shifted, they retained their human minds, able to control the animal bodies as they did the human.

Hawke wouldn't have taken off like that if he'd been in control. Lyon feared his friend was lost to the wildness inside him.

"I thought he'd be okay once he came to." Tighe took a step toward the window, glass crunching beneath his boot.

Lyon shook his head, his expression grave. "He's damaged." The question was, just how damaged? He prayed the answer wasn't beyond repair.

"Faith, look! A rainbow."

Maria's cry of pleasure had Faith pushing herself off the sagging mattress to join the teen at the cracked window of Faith's small apartment.

"Lame," Paulina muttered from the bed where she sat, bent low, drawing on her palm.

Sure enough, a rainbow glistened above the tenements across the street in one of the worst sections of Warsaw, Poland, a neighborhood virtually untouched in more than a century - beautiful old buildings derelict and crumbling, their art nouveau façades nearly hidden beneath decades of grime, wrought-iron window rails rusting and bent as if they, along with the city's people, had suffered the Nazis' bludgeoning and the communists' iron fist.

Shoulder to shoulder with Maria, Faith smiled. "It's a beautiful rainbow."

"You're both lame."

Faith turned to the dark-haired girl on the bed with a shrug. "I like rainbows."

"You like everything."

"Not everything. Just things that make me happy."

"Like me?" Maria piped up.

Faith laughed. "Especially you."

Maria turned back to the window with a wistful sigh. "I wish I could follow the rainbow to its end, to see where it goes."

"Maybe we should do that." Faith hadn't known either girl long, but she'd quickly become fond of them. They'd become her latest projects, or more accurately, getting them off the streets had become her latest in a lifetime of such missions.

"I couldn't leave Stanislov," Maria said mournfully. "He needs me."