Obsession Untamed (Feral Warriors #2)(66)

“I’ll never help you.”

He smiled, the coldness rushing back into his eyes. “Oh, but you will. Now, as a matter of fact.”

He swung off her, then moved until he was kneeling at her head. Her heart thundered with terror as he gripped her face with both icy hands.

Cold flowed into her. So cold. Every time he touched her, her body temperature dropped another degree, until she feared she was at risk for hypothermia.

“What are you doing?” she demanded, unable to keep the quaver out of her voice.

For more than a minute, he didn’t answer, just stroked her temples with gentle thumbs as he watched her upside down.

His fingers stopped their caressing and his grip tightened. “What am I doing? I’m making you mine, Delaney. I’m making you mine.”

His fingers squeezed. Pain unlike anything she’d ever imagined poured into her head and began to pump through her veins like acid. Screams tore through her mind, raking her flesh.

Deep inside, she felt something unnatural, something evil, take root and grow.

Tighe tore through the woods, following his tiger’s scent of smoke as surely as his own human sense of direction. The moment he reached the back of the burning houses, he knew Delaney wasn’t in any of them. The lots were small, houses crowding too close in the back.

Sirens tore through the lightly falling rain, and he took off. The humans could take care of their own.

As he headed toward the more affluent area where a house might back onto nothing but woods, he caught a glimpse of Wulfe.

I may have picked up the clone’s scent, Wulfe said. It’s not a smell, exactly, but I remember feeling something similar near where we found her phone.

I’m right behind you, Tighe told him, and raced after him, his sleek tiger’s body eating up the ground with ease. “Wulfe’s picked up a scent,” he told Hawke.

I heard. I’ve got you spotted. I’m following.

Tighe recognized the trees behind a large brick-front Colonial a split second before he heard the scream.

“I’ll take the front,” Wulfe said.

A large bay window framed kitchen cabinets. Without a single pause, Tighe flew over the high railing of the deck and crashed through the glass.

Delaney lay on the floor, staked in the center of the pentagram as he’d seen her in the vision. He could hear her heart beating. Unconscious, but alive. Thank you, goddess.

Hawke ran in from the front of the house. “Where is he?”

Tighe shifted back into a man. “He wasn’t here. Find him.” He pulled out one of his switchblades and knelt at Delaney’s feet, cutting her loose. He’d freed her feet and pushed her legs together, and was sawing at the third bond when Wulfe and Hawke ran into the room from the opposite door.

“Where is he?” Hawke demanded.

Déjà vu. Tighe froze and stared at his friend. Understanding crashed over him like falling ice. “He was here. He was you.” Tighe leaped to his feet. “Bleed! Now.”

Wulfe and Hawke each pulled a knife and cut himself, then held their palms up as the blood ran down their flesh.

Tighe sliced his own.

“Find him!”

Damn it. Damn it! He’d been so concerned with Delaney, he’d forgotten the clone could change shape at will. That error just might cost him his life.

But he’d found her. He’d found her.

At least he thought he had. He could take no more chances. Lifting her free hand, he pressed the tip of his knife into her finger, drawing a single droplet of blood. She flinched, jerking her hand, and stirred.

As he watched, her eyes fluttered open, her gaze going from him to the knife still smeared with his own blood. With devastating dismay he watched those brown eyes fill with hopelessness and fear.

Fear. Of him.

He hated her fear.

Inside his head, the chaos rushed at him in a deafening roar.

“No, D, no!” He growled, his jaw clenching, his fingertips burning. “You’re safe.”

But he wasn’t.

The chaos broke over him like a tidal wave, the fury clawing through his limbs, into his heart and head, swirling inside him as he fought to battle it back.

But it was too strong. His defenses against it too badly cracked.

Too late. Too late.

His claws unsheathed. His fangs dropped.

His conscious mind disappeared in a bottomless well of darkness.

Chapter Twenty-five

“Tighe?”

Delaney fought against the pain that encased her body, struggling to clear her mind as a battle raged around her. He’d come for her. For one horrible moment she’d thought he was the clone, but then she’d heard his voice. He’d come for her.

She forced her eyes open, then squeezed them shut as something sailed over her head. A battle. They’d caught him. But the sounds that reached her ears were oddly, frighteningly familiar. Growling. Snarling. The breaking of furniture, just like the two times Tighe had lost it.

Oh, no. Please, not that.

She tried to move and realized she was only tied by one wrist. So cold. Exhaustion tugged at her battered mind, and she curled onto her side.

Stay awake. Warn them.

Out of the corner of her eye, another Feral appeared. Jag, her mind suggested.

His gaze went to the pile of dead bodies, his face screwing up in disgust. “Jesus. Someone needs to teach that demon to clean up after himself when he’s done eating. He’s feeding the whole bloody fly population of Northern Virginia!”