“Who’s this?” she asked. “This your girl?”
“Nope,” he answered, grabbing the photograph and tossing it aside on the carpet by where they lay. From the other room, he heard Angel and Peaches’ friend starting up again. They were at the friend’s apartment, and Angel and she had taken the bedroom while Cyrus and his date had taken residence on the living room floor.
“So, who’s the girl?” she asked again. This time turning back to him, and taking a cue from the couple behind closed doors, Peaches took his semi-hard cock in her hand and stroked, first softly, then harder.
Cyrus laid his head back, closing his eyes. His mind wandered back to the picture of Sunday as a grown woman. He imagined opening her up like a cabinet of curiosities. His erection grew full in Peaches’ hand as his wolf rose to the surface. Rather than ignore it, he let Peaches stroke him through it, as the photograph of Sunday in her sundress built in his mind. Tattooed flowers draped over her shoulder and cascaded down her arm. He hadn’t seen them yet, but he’d learned that gladiolas covered her leg. Always, in his memories, like in the photograph, her gaze hovered just beyond him. Cyrus found himself wondering, not for the first time, what it would be like to look straight into the honey saucers of her eyes.
Peaches leaned into his ear and whispered, “Tell me about her.”
“She’s a woman I used to know.” The timbre of his voice rumbled through his chest.
“Why do you carry around a picture of her?” Peaches purred.
Cyrus hesitated as he delved into the cavern of his memory to a place deep inside where the Incarnate lived. He gritted his teeth as he pictured her, at fourteen, covered in bruises and dried blood as he carried her from Bernadette’s torture chamber. For years, he could believe that what his pack had done had been just, but that faith was misplaced. The Incarnate was a monster, but delivering a child into weeks of torture was a fucking atrocity.
A confluence of self-hatred and hate for the Incarnate brewed in him.
“I ran into her a while ago while I was on a job,” Cyrus answered. “At first, I didn’t recognize her. She had to have been in her early twenties, and I hadn’t seen her since she was a kid.”
He gasped as Peaches found her rhythm, keeping pace with the feelings evoked by the vision of Sunday.
“She was older. But it was the same face. And she was… fucking
beautiful
.” His breath caught in his throat again, and he growled. Opening his eyes and looking into Peaches’, his erection softened, and she forced his head back.
“Keep telling me, babe,” she said. “I like what it’s doing to you.”
When Peaches combed through his hair, Cyrus imagined Sunday’s caress. His cock jerked in response.
“I’m gonna need you real stiff to ride your big cock again.”
If it took another woman to get Cyrus hard, then Peaches would let it happen.
“I was in Austin at a festival.” He was verbalizing in fragments. “I was talking to someone else. I don’t know how I saw her. She wasn’t standing out. I just knew. I
felt
her.”
As a familiar hurricane brewed in his belly, Cyrus’ attention drifted from the werewolf he was talking to, to the tall brunette. Of everything that he could have noticed, that woman yards away drew him like a magnet. Instantly, his skin pricked and his senses tuned only to her. As he watched her, whatever the werewolf was telling Cyrus turned into white noise. The woman’s hand reached toward her face, and she brushed a long, errant tress behind her ear, revealing her face. The recognition of whom she was almost knocked him over. The gut-wrenching desire to tear her apart rose with a conflicting desperation for her touch.
“I didn’t even know it was her. I couldn’t have known. She was lost for so long. The last I heard, she had taken off, and no one had seen her for years. But there she was.”
Peaches leaned closer into Cyrus’ ear. She kissed his lobe and dug her tongue into his ear.
“You wanted her.”
“Yes.”
“Did you get her?”
“No.”
“You got
me
,” she purred, sucking his lobe again.
Cyrus’ eyes shot open. He grabbed Peaches by her bony hips and pulled her onto his lap, buckling her knees at his sides. He brought his mouth to her breasts and tore at her hard nubs with his teeth. Peaches brought her hands to his head and yanked it back to smash her mouth onto his. While Cyrus feasted on Peaches’ mouth with carnal abandon, she lifted her hips and teased the tip of his cock with her moist entrance.
“I’m gonna fuck that girl right out of you,” she said, her words demanding, her stare burning into him.
His eyes were the color of flames, anger burning away the image of Sunday looking over her shoulder, scanning the crowd at the festival, looking just ahead of him at the stand that was blocking her line of sight. She’d smiled then, pleased with whatever she had seen or whatever she hadn’t seen.
Smiled.
Aware of who she was, Cyrus revved himself up with hate. The once-dormant tumult of passion and ire erupted in him once more. She should have known better. Given her abnormal sensitivity to the world around her, the Incarnate should have been able to catch a whiff of what was welling inside of him. She should have run for her life. But she didn’t. As she had through all the years they’d spent together, she didn’t even know he was there.
Before he could linger on that encounter any longer, Peaches lowered herself onto his erection. Cyrus’ muscles tensed and rippled down his body. She pulled his face to hers and left an inch of space between them.
“I’m gonna fuck her right out of you,” she swore.
There was no question as to what was happening. These were two people entering into some violent, carnal fucking. There would be no love, no softness, and no care. These were needs that had to be met. Hunger that ravaged. A man who could kill the woman that inspired such conflict within him, and a woman who ached to be wanted, wanted to be desired.
“Please,” he responded. No pleading in his tone. It was a command, a challenge. “Do it,” he said. “Get rid of her.”
CHAPTER THREE
Angel threw his hands up and slammed them back down on the dash. Cyrus had just returned from interviewing a woman that recognized Sunday from a photograph. The werewolves shared a hard, long stare. A tip they collected during their last stop, Reno, had led them to Chicago. On this, their second night in the Windy City, they finally found a witness that confirmed Sunday had been there, but the information wasn’t current, and there were no clues to where she’d gone to next.
“I can’t
believe
she’s this good!” Angel’s rough voice cracked in exasperation. “When she was a kid, she
let
us kidnap her. Now, she’s practically a ghost. Did she get some covert ops training after she annihilated the witch-bitch? For
two years
, we’ve been at this shit, and we’re still nowhere close to grabbing her.”
His obsidian eyes shone with the street lamp overhead that flooded into the car. The parking lot was dark but for that light and the neon sign at the door of the club. Club goers were already starting to head out for the night. It was nearing last call. The two werewolves sat in the truck, reviewing Cyrus’ findings from his interviews inside. One girl had recognized Sunday in the most recent photograph he carried of her. Even as he carried it in his shirt pocket, it burned against his chest.
“She’s good, but she’s not perfect,” Cyrus said.
He pulled out his phone and displayed the latest image of the Incarnate. Mostly, the trails turned up cold, but sometimes, like this time, they paid off with some bit of new information. The girl who had recognized Sunday’s photo at the club emailed him some pictures from a year and a half earlier. So far, it was the closest they’d come to locating her. For all intents and purposes, the Incarnate had fallen off the radar in the last year. Her pit stops along the road had, until then, been consistent. Every couple of months, she popped up in a different location. That is, until she stopped showing up altogether. The hunters had been turned around a couple of times since then. It was starting to feel like they were never going to catch up to her.
“She makes mistakes,” Angel said as he yanked the phone from Cyrus’ hand. “Thank
Christ
, she makes mistakes.”
He inspected the pictures, scrolling through them and looking for any clues.
“Take a look at this one,” he said, turning the phone back to Cyrus. “We get leg in this one. That’s the tattoo the dick in Reno inked.” He nodded sharply to Cyrus. “It’s good work from the looks of it. Too bad that guy’s a waste of fucking air.”
Cyrus turned away from the phone and leered out the window. Images of Sunday straddling the tattoo artist on some dirty motel sheets flashed through his mind. His fingernails dug into the palms of his hands, and his face grew red. Over a decade earlier, the Incarnate lit a spark in him, and the fire still raged. Picturing her with other men caused a cataclysm in his chest. He didn’t know whether he wanted to kill her, or kill the man with her. Either outcome would have been sufficient in putting him out of his misery. The Incarnate shouldn’t be walking around and doing whatever she liked or
whomever
she liked. She should be locked up, encased in a glass box, and stored away where she couldn’t cause any more damage.
“What it
doesn’t
tell us is anything we don’t already know,” Cyrus spat. “This picture’s almost two years old. All we learn from this is that she’s following her protocol: Always keeping her head low, but not afraid of anyone seeing her. Always playing close to the vest, but nice enough not to bash heads and leave a trail of corpses in her wake. This photographer chick places the Incarnate here only a few months after the last known location, but no one’s seen her since.”
Angel tossed the phone back to Cyrus and pulled a cigarette from his pocket. The men shared a long silence as Angel smoked. Another photograph or two didn’t change the fact that Angel was right. They
were
no closer to finding her than they’d been two years earlier. Just as Angel started the engine, a girl in black heels, striped, thigh-high stockings, and a short, lace skirt barreled out of the club and waved them down.
“Hey! Wait!” she shouted.
Jogging behind her was another
Nightmare before Christmas
reject in head-to-toe, skintight leather and goth face paint. The pair skidded to a halt and coughed, breathless from running across the parking lot. As soon as they reached his window, Cyrus dropped a tattooed arm out to them and raised it to keep them from taking another step. They reeked of booze and sweat, and finally having caught some decent air outside the club, Cyrus wasn’t about to punish his heightened senses with the stench of partying.
“Chico says he met the girl.” She looked over her shoulder and gestured for her friend to step forward. “I just told him about you wanting the pictures of some girl, and he remembered her.”
Cyrus’ calloused fingers combed through his blond, salt-and-pepper beard as he assessed the poseur. The kid was buzzed, and his wild eyes hopped between the stern faces glaring at him and Cyrus’ bare arm hanging out the window. Sweat beaded on his pasty, white face as he caught his breath.
“Nice work there, bro,” he said, smiling broadly and pointing to Cyrus’ forearm. “Who did your ink? I’ve got a guy here in–”
“We’re not here to talk about tattoos,” Cyrus challenged. “I’m pretty sure you’re out here to tell me and my friend here about the girl in those photos,
bro
.”
Behind Cyrus, Angel snarled as he stared Chico down. Two imposing figures asking all the questions and giving no answers weren’t looking for small talk. Chico’s face dropped, and he stared at his steel-toe boots.
“Yeah… the girl,” he stammered. “She was here a while ago, like Cheryl said. But I guess Cheryl only saw her here when she was taking shots for the website.” He turned to the girl for confirmation, and she nodded back.
“I only saw her that one other time,” he added, chewing his lip.
Cyrus’ eyebrow shot up. It was the sole fissure on his stone mask. He leaned forward so that his shoulders inched out from the window. The kids had his attention.
One other time
was evidently remarkable enough that this dipshit still remembered it.
“You saw her after that night?”
“I’m the manager of a car lot over in Bolingbrook. Used cars.”
Cyrus turned to Angel and nodded. The Incarnate was good, but wasn’t good enough not to need a car if she was traveling. They’d found a car once that had been linked to her, and that she’d sold through a Craigslist ad to a couple in Nevada. They’d been able to track her to Reno because of that car. All they needed was a make, model, or tag number to pop into their databases, and they could locate her.
“Tell us about it,” Angel urged the kid.
“I manage the place, right. She was on the lot looking at cars, and one of my guys talking to her came in and told me this girl wanted to pick up a ride in exchange for her old one, and he needed me to sign off on it. I walked out, and it was the girl from Cher’s pics. Just asked about the price tag on a few cars and what she could do to turn in the one she had.” He grinned, thinking back on the exchange. He cocked a grin over to Cyrus and whistled.
“You don’t forget that girl. Came up and asked if she could trade the cars clear, and I swear I didn’t want to, but man, I’d have given her anything off the lot scot-free if she’d asked.”
Behind Cyrus, Angel murmured, “Just like her, eh? Pullin’ the Voodoo for a car.”
“Bet she didn’t get papers for it, did she?” Angel said, raising his voice so that Chico could hear him. The kid shrugged.
“Maybe you can come by the lot on Monday?” he suggested. “I can look for some paperwork on the car she took. It’s a
car
. We had it, and then we didn’t. There’s gotta be something.”
Both men in the car looked at each other. It was Thursday night just after midnight. They couldn’t think of a better time to kidnap a used car salesman and make him break into his place of business. Turning back to the kids, both men smiled their best wolfish grins.