Obsession Untamed (Feral Warriors #2)(37)

Tighe! He felt the fog circling her, swirls of black threatening her.

He reached out to her, but the suffocating darkness had her in its grasp, pulling her down.

Tighe!

Her voice was smaller, more distant. And filled with such fear. Such pain.

Delaney.

He reached for her through his mind, but she slipped through his grasp, disappearing into the dark, perilous fog.

And then she was gone.

“Tighe?” Kara’s voice broke through the fog.

The vision dissipated. He shook his head, clearing his sight as he blinked, trying to understand what he’d just seen, even as desperation to find her leaped inside him, rising side by side with a terror not his own.

Delaney’s.

What had happened? Someone was hurting her. Or some thing.

He stilled. It had almost felt as if the vision itself had turned on her.

Goddess, yes, that was exactly what had happened. The visions had been growing too much for her human mind. Too strong. She’d finally broken beneath the weight of this one and fallen into that dark for good.

Deep in his heart he feared she wouldn’t break free of it on her own.

He started for the door.

“What happened?” Lyon demanded.

“Delaney needs me. I’ve got to find her.” How? She wouldn’t have gone home. He was certain of that. He lunged from the room and strode down the hall toward the front door.

He heard her calling to him. Felt the pull of her through that accidental connection he’d formed with her when he’d tried to cloud her mind, and prayed it would be enough to follow.

Behind him, he heard Lyon barking orders. “Hawke, Kougar, and Jag, go with him. Take two different sedans this time, in case the humans took note of the first ones.”

Lyon’s voice receded as Tighe ran out the door. What if he couldn’t find her? What if he did, and he couldn’t reach her mind?

I have to save her.

Desperation and determination wove and twined inside him, fueled and fired by a rage that was all too real. The clone already threatened Tighe’s own life. He would not let him and these evil visions destroy Delaney, too.

If they hadn’t already.

As Tighe ran for the nearest car, he feared it might be too late. Even if he managed to find her, would there be anything left of her mind to save?

Chapter Thirteen

Darkness swallowed her, swallowed everything. Sight, sound, even her sense of touch. Delaney felt nothing but the distant echoes of pain.

She had a sense that she was standing. Perhaps even walking. But where? With her hand, she reached out and touched nothing. She lifted her hand to her head, and it wasn’t there.

Panic welled up, and she shoved it down, forcing logic into the void. Not real. This isn’t real.

Her body was still lying on the bed where Dr. Jensen had left her. It was only her mind that had taken off, swept away by a vision she hadn’t seen, into a darkness she didn’t know how to escape.

The last time she’d glimpsed this darkness, Tighe had snatched her back before it could suck her in. But Tighe was dead.

Grief mixed with the panic that welled again, clawing at her mind. She struggled to escape, to find her way out of the dark, but it was as if she were trying to run with her feet set in concrete.

Lost. So lost.

Tears fell through the silent darkness as loneliness grew to gigantic proportions, a suffocating cold stamping out every thought.

The terror reared up, swallowing her whole as a single word screamed through her head again, shattering the choking silence.

Tighe!

“Turn right.”

“You sure?” Hawke asked.

Tighe growled, his fingernails clenched into the palms of his hands. “Do it!”

The car turned onto a residential street in an upscale Arlington neighborhood.

“Expensive digs for an FBI agent,” Jag drawled.

“The house isn’t hers,” Tighe said. “Ten bucks says it’s acting as an FBI safe house. She’s being guarded.”

“We’ll shift and knock them out,” Hawke said. “Jag, you stay with the car.”

Jag muttered something under his breath. Tighe didn’t need to hear it to know the warrior was railing against the fates for not giving him the ability to keep his clothes on when he shifted.

“Which house?” Hawke asked.

“I’ll tell you when I know.” Tighe’s sense of Delaney had been growing steadily since they left Feral House, drawing him to her with a solid pull. His heart pounded as her terror weaved through his brain. Over and over, he heard her calling for him with a desperation, a hopelessness, that tore at his battered soul. She thought he was dead, yet knew he was her only hope.

She thought she was well and truly trapped.

“Here!” Tighe wasn’t certain how he knew she was in the single upstairs bedroom with the light still on, but he knew.

Hawke continued to drive by the house, the night’s darkness hiding the features of the men inside the car. They’d left the second sedan two streets over. If the situation went south, they’d split up and meet again elsewhere.

When they’d turned the next corner, Hawke parked along the side of the road.

“Shift,” Tighe ordered, then called to the animal who lived inside him, pushing past the tiger, straight to the smaller form of house cat. As a younger Feral, he’d had to go first to his full tiger form before he could downsize. A serious handicap he’d quickly learned to overcome.