Obsession Untamed (Feral Warriors #2)(8)

Teeth marks.

The clone had attacked her, yet she hadn’t died. How was that possible?

Praise the heavens and Earth.

He scowled at himself for the relief and, hell, joy rushing through him. She was human, for heaven’s sake. Human.

Yet there was little about her that reminded him of Gretchen. She was tall where Gretchen had been short. She was dark where Gretchen had been fair. And even in the vision her eyes burned with fire, the same fire that had lit their depths as she’d faced the clone. While Gretchen’s eyes would, in his memory, always radiate with fear.

There was a fury simmering inside this woman that he sensed was as much a part of her as her brown hair and high cheekbones. He didn’t have to hear her thoughts to know she wanted to catch the creature that had attacked her.

But it wasn’t going to happen.

There was no way the Ferals could allow human law enforcement to get their hands on that thing. The moment they realized he didn’t bleed, it was all over. For centuries, the Therian and Mage races had been careful to hide their existence from the humans. The mortals had become too numerous, too powerful. Yet their fear and hatred of the things they didn’t understand was as great as ever. The moment they learned of the immortal races among them, they’d turn their considerable cunning and weaponry toward eliminating them.

They’d end up destroying the only ones who could save them.

The woman grimaced suddenly, her face contorting in a pain she quickly masked. Shards of agony bolted through her eyes as her body went tense as a wire. She grabbed for the sink in much the same way he’d grabbed for the kitchen counter a moment ago. As if she feared she’d fall if she didn’t.

Suddenly, a second vision overlaid the woman’s face in his mind’s eye. An old woman this time, with terror in her eyes as her face became a blur and her wrinkled neck loomed large.

“Oh, God,” the dark-eyed beauty gasped, and suddenly she was the only one he was seeing again. “What did he do to me?” she whispered to her reflection. “It wasn’t enough that he almost killed me. Now I’m going to have to watch him kill others?”

Tighe’s scalp tingled as the meaning of her words became clear. She was seeing the murders. She was getting his visions.

“Agent Randall?” A second woman appeared in the bathroom mirror. An older woman of Asian descent rushed toward the beauty. “Delaney, what’s the matter?”

“Nothing,” his vision-stealer said brusquely and straightened, the pain and emotion disappearing from her expression as if they’d never been. “I’m fine.”

Tighe blinked as the beauty disappeared. He turned to find Hawke watching him expectantly.

“What did you see?”

Tighe shook his head, reeling at the implications. Staggering from the inexplicable need to find the woman.

“Someone’s stealing my visions.”

“What do you mean?”

He met Hawke’s piercing gaze. “One of the two women I watched the clone attack didn’t die. The FBI agent. I just watched her as she saw the next murder. I saw snatches of it, but nothing useful.”

“Interesting,” Hawke murmured.

“I saw the bite marks on her neck. I know it’s the same woman.” As if he could forget the face he’d been staring at in his memory for twenty-four hours straight.

Hawke’s eyes got that faraway look they always got when his mental gears started moving at the speed of light. “She probably had backup. If her partner shot the clone as he was sucking her life force, he may have inadvertently exhaled some of his own back into her at that moment of impact, then fled without finishing the feeding.”

Tighe scowled. “Are you telling me she has some of my soul now, too?”

“No. Not your soul. A soul can’t be split without serious magic. But I think she may have acquired a touch of your clone’s life force. Just enough to make her only 99.9 percent human.”

Tighe groaned. “Just enough to screw up everything.”

“Probably.”

“Grab your laptop, Hawke, and start hacking. I need an address for FBI agent Delaney Randall.”

“We going after her?”

“Not we. Me. I’m going alone. The Feds already know what I look like.”

Kougar plucked at his goatee. “Kill her. Get her out from between you and your clone.”

His gut twisted as he met Kougar’s pale gaze, as cold as any assassin’s. Not for the first time, he thanked Nature this warrior was friend and not foe.

“Rest assured, that clone is going to die,” Tighe said. “And no one, no one, is going to stand in my way.”

But he remembered too well his furious thought when he first thought he was destined to kill her.

She can’t die.

Chapter Four

Delaney pressed the elevator button in the FBI field office, her head pounding. Six aspirin over the course of the afternoon hadn’t done a thing to help, as if mere aspirin could relieve the tension of knowing that at any moment, in her head she could be watching another murder take place. Three so far this afternoon. Three.

Each more painful than the last.

What had that bastard done to her?

If she had to acquire superpowers, why couldn’t she have gotten X-ray vision? Or maybe the ability to fly? Visions of death were so not on her wish list.