Obsession Untamed (Feral Warriors #2)(27)

The tiger raised its head deep inside him, a growl rumbling in his throat.

Yeah, the thought of her in another man’s arms didn’t please him either. But he certainly didn’t want her for himself. She was human.

And if she wasn’t?

He shook off the weirdly disturbing thought and turned his attention once more to hunting for his clone.

Several hours later, as the sun rose behind overcast skies, Hawke called.

“Any luck?” the Feral asked.

“None. Not a sign of him. But no more visions. Which either means he hasn’t fed yet, or Delaney doesn’t get them in her sleep.”

“We’re back in the safe house, looking for a little sleep ourselves.”

“I’m going to drive around a bit longer.” He snapped the phone closed. As tired and hungry as he was, he couldn’t bring himself to call it quits. Admittedly, he was loath to take Delaney back to the safe house with Kougar and Hawke there. And she was sleeping so soundly, he didn’t want to wake her.

He stroked her hair as he had a hundred times over the past hours. But the real truth was, holding her like this, with her fragile head tucked against him, eased his battered soul the way nothing else had.

The tiger purred with satisfaction, a fact he might have found a tad disturbing if he weren’t too tired to think about it. The tiger rarely paid any attention to the women he was with.

He glanced into the rearview mirror, lifting his sunglasses to look at his eyes. Yesterday, for the first time, he’d noticed a black streak across one of his irises, slicing through the green like the shadow from a lightning bolt. Today, there were several across each. He didn’t know what it meant—Hawke hadn’t either—but he had a sick feeling it wasn’t good.

An hour later, when the rumbling of his stomach became so loud he was afraid he was going to wake half of D.C., he turned the car toward Capitol Hill and the safe house.

Minutes later, Delaney jerked in her sleep, then moaned with pain. “Not again.”

Tighe pressed a hand to her forehead as she lay on his lap. A vision roared into his head, knocking the breath from him as it punched him in the gut.

This bastard needed to die.

Chapter Nine

The scene flashed into Tighe’s inner vision.

As before, it didn’t steal his sight as the visions did when they were his alone. Instead, he continued to see the street before him clearly. He watched the two scenes as though through two separate pairs of eyes.

A young woman lay on the floor, her eyes filled with terror as she struggled to remove the gag from her mouth. Hands that weren’t Tighe’s held her down.

“Do you know who I am?” the clone hissed in the woman’s ear.

The woman shook her head frantically.

“I’m the D.C. Vampire.”

Tighe’s stomach clenched. The bastard knew exactly what was going on. He must be holed up somewhere watching the news between attacks, a hugely disturbing thought because the clone was definitely past the stage of being merely a feeding machine. He was thinking. Plotting. Learning. And that was not good news.

The woman’s eyes went impossibly wide with terror. Precisely what his clone intended, Tighe realized. Why else had he told her what the news media was calling him? He wanted her afraid. He was feeding off her fear.

Definitely evolving. An unthinking animal would feed the simplest way possible. In this case, by stealing raw life force, draining his victim. Feeding from fear took more finesse. More cunning. Something his clone was clearly developing.

Not good. Not good at all.

Delaney’s hand moved to cover his, holding it tight against her forehead. “Don’t let go,” she pleaded.

“I’ve got you.”

“How does your touch help, Tighe? How do you ease the pain?”

“I’m not sure, but I suspect it’s all part of your getting in the way of my connection with my twin. When I touch you, I’m able to access the vision your brain is trying to shut out, completing that connection. The pressure in your head eases.”

“That makes sense,” she murmured. “And yet no sense at all. People are not electrical circuits. None of this should be happening.”

If she only knew. She’d only glimpsed the tip of what would appear to her human eyes to be a very large and terrifying iceberg. He prayed to the goddess she never saw the rest. The terror in her eyes would be more than he could stand. In his current state, he’d be flung into the chaos for good.

In that other place, the demon grabbed his captive’s arms, breaking one, then the other as she screamed.

“Can you see this?” he asked Delaney.

“No.”

He stilled as the clone’s sights turned to a playpen filled with three wide-eyed toddlers. Rage tore through him as the monster closed the distance between them.

Behind the clone, Tighe could hear the injured woman’s whimpers turn to outrage as the clone reached down and picked up one of the little ones, lifting her chubby neck to his mouth.

Tighe groaned. “Sweet goddess.”

“What’s he doing?” Delaney asked, her voice tight with pain.

“He broke her arms. Now he’s killing her babies. As she watches.”

Delaney moaned, curling in on herself as if she’d taken a punch to the stomach. “We have to get him.”