Claimed (Book Four of the Castle Coven Series): A Witch and Warlock Romance Novel (8 page)

When she finally fell asleep, her arm was draped over Kieran’s chest, and Piers was spooned against her back. She had spent most of her life without a home; now she wondered if she had found it between these two men.

HAILEY WOKE WHEN Piers got out of bed. The light was still dim, and when she slid out from under the covers, she shivered at how cold it was. She dressed warmly, and when she came down to the kitchen, she found that Kieran had already eaten.

“There’s eggs and oatmeal in the oven. Eat up. That will probably be the best food we’ll get all day.”
 

His manner was brusque to the point of being rude, a far cry from the passionate lover he had been the night before. Hailey ate her food quietly, unsure of how to take this change. Piers seemed unperturbed, eating his meal quickly and giving her a brief kiss as he went to wash his plates.
 

When they went outside, Kieran turned to them both.

“I want to make our way into the mountains as quickly and as subtly as possible. Piers, I want you above, keeping an eye on things, and I’ll move forward on foot. Hailey, it would be safest if you stayed in animal forms if you can, wolf when you’re with me and eagle when you’re with Piers. With three pairs of eyes, hopefully we’ll be able to see something, whether it’s a sign of Templars or a sign of the man who went missing. If we haven’t seen anything by dusk, we’ll break off and camp. Do you have any questions?”

Both Piers and Hailey shook their heads. Kieran nodded.

“All right, Piers up in the air, Hailey, go ahead and start with your wolf form.”

Piers launched himself up into the sky. Hailey watched him for a moment before turning to Kieran.
 

“Kieran…”

“There is a mission that we need to accomplish, Hailey. That comes first.”

He could see that she was stung by his words. He sighed, started to reach for her, and then drew his hand back.
 

“There is…too much to deal with right now. I promise, though, when we return, I will give you the answers that you are looking for. I swear.”

Hailey nodded, knowing even in her disappointment that he was right. She took his hand, pulling from the dark sea that represented his power. She remembered what Liona had said, about how she wasn’t just taking energy from him. Instead she thought about sharing it. The ocean she could see was dark and choppy, but as she pulled power from Kieran, she tried to think about it as bringing light to him as well.
 

She wasn’t sure if what she had tried to do had worked at all, but when she pulled back, there was a slightly confused look on his face. He looked like he wanted to speak, but instead shook his head.

“Are you ready?”

She nodded, not trusting herself to speak. Instead, she closed her eyes and concentrated on her transformation. In a matter of seconds, her body had twisted and changed. She saw the world through eyes that were much sharper, but it was the scents that truly changed how she experienced things. It was all she could do not to run off into the forest to see what was going on.
 

Kieran seemed to sense her excitement. She won a grin out of him, something that made him into a man that she recognized again. She thought in that moment that she would do anything for him. Any amount of fighting and risk was worth it, if he would stay at her side.

“Come, Hailey. We have a long road ahead of us and a great deal of ground to cover. Stay close by my side, but remember to use that nose of yours. If something seems out of place, dangerous or odd, let me know at once.”

She would have saluted teasingly if she could. Instead she barked briskly and fell into place by his side. She loved her new body. It felt tireless, as if she could keep up her steady trot forever and a day. Hailey forced herself to remember that she wasn’t out in the woods for a stroll. There was a man’s life at stake. There might be Templars in the area.
 

The sky grew lighter and dawn finally appeared. Hailey was fascinated by the fact that she could sense a great deal of what had passed the night before. She could sense where a badger had crossed their path, and she was more interested than she felt comfortable with in a spot where a fox had made a meal of a rabbit.

She kept her mind on the task at hand, however, looking for the scent that would tell her that that something strange had occurred.

It was a few hours past dawn when Piers came down to rest in the tree above them.
 

“There’s smoke coming up from something that’s slightly to the west of us. Is it possible that there’s an old mountaineer or hermit in these parts?”

Kieran shook his head.

“No, this area of the mountains is typically a little too dangerous for people to simply want to live here. We should definitely have a peek. Here, while you’re down, feed your face.”

He tossed a protein bar at Piers, who caught it. Kieran turned to Hailey.

“Change up, and have some food as well. After that, you can join Dayton in the sky.”

It almost hurt to leave her wolf form, to feel her sharp senses being exchanged for senses that were not half so fine. She sighed. At least in her human form, she could touch Piers when he leaped down from the tree.
 

After she finished her protein bar, she took Piers’s arm, pulling his golden energy from him and trying to make it more than it was, as she had done with Kieran. He definitely looked startled, but then he shook his head, as if not quite certain what he had felt.
 

Hailey took a deep breath and concentrated. She wished for a moment that she could have changed into an owl, as she knew her own familiar’s body well. However, a man who lived at the first coven she had lived at had turned into an eagle. Once she had asked him what it was like. He fixed her with an eye that was far keener than a human’s.

“It’s like being sharpened,” he said at last. “It’s like all of your focus, all of your will and your power is focused in your eyes. You can see farther than any other animal in the world. You can see as clearly under water as you can in dry air. It’s like being a king.”

She focused on his words, and she imagined what it would be like to soar into the air on wings that were broad and strong. She imagined what it would be like to have heavy talons that could bring down small deer. She barely noticed when she started shrinking and twisting.
 

When Hailey opened her eyes, she almost cried out. The forest that they had been walking through had been beautiful in its own right, but now it was lit from within, showing her a panoply of gem-like colors all in a vivid degree of sharpness that she had never imagined existed. Her sense of smell was not too different from what she had as a human, but it palled in comparison to what her eyes could see.

Piers grinned down at her.

“All right, darling, ready to fly?”

“Be careful.” Kieran’s voice was sharp. “If you get tired, come down at once.”

Hailey barely listened to either of them as she pumped her wings twice, hard. Then with a loud cry, she launched herself from the ground. It was clumsier than she thought it would be. Her first flaps were slow and lumbering, but as she put more distance between herself and the ground, she felt herself grow lighter and lighter. Soon she was hundreds of feet above where Kieran stood. Piers shot up next to her, nudging her slightly as he rose. She glanced up to see a sharp, proud grin on his face.

“Come on, Hailey, try and keep up,” he shouted, and with an inward grin, she shot after him.

Quickly, they fell into a search pattern that would maximize their range. They flew from side to side, crossing paths close to where Kieran still walked. Using him as a center, they could cover a great deal of ground.

She couldn’t get over how much she could see. If she cared to look, every rock and every rustle in the branches was obvious to her. She did quickly realize that the instincts of the eagle were more powerful than those of the wolf, however. More than once, she stopped herself from going into a dive. Seeing a fish in a stream or a rabbit in a bare patch of land made her talons itch.
 

More than an hour later, her sharp eyes caught sight of a strange shape in a clearing in her path. Letting out a loud scream, she spiraled over the spot, making sure that Piers saw her go down. When she landed, she returned to her human form, Piers lighting down beside her.

“Is that…what I think it is?” she asked, her voice soft and scared.

In the clearing were the remnants of a tent. It had been caved in from the top, and there were supplies scattered around the dead campfire. The light dusting of snow did nothing to cover the destroyed site. Instead, it only added to the air of desolation and fear.
 

Kieran appeared as if materializing out of the forest, his face grim.

“I saw you both drop down and came to look. Stand back, I want to get closer.”

Piers and Hailey hung back while Kieran carefully turned over the site. For a full twenty minutes, he went over the goods, occasionally nodding to himself. Finally, he stood and walked over to where they stood.

“It’s definitely a Magus Corps officer’s campsite. Those are the same supplies as the ones that I’ve used and we’re using right now. I don’t know what could take him out of it like this; he wouldn’t have left it this way on his own.”

“Something large,” mused Piers, looking over the destruction. “But it didn’t kill him, did it?”
 

“No, or at least, there’s no sign of blood or anything else. As far as I can tell, something came down and dragged him off.”
 

Hailey shivered to think about what could be powerful enough to remove a Magus Corps officer from his tent. All of them were trained in the armed and unarmed forms of combat. Some of them, like Kieran himself, had had centuries to hone themselves in the arts of war.
 

“I was looking for incendiary devices,” Kieran continued. “Templars and the Magus Corps have been at this war for some time, and they will leave bombs in places that they have attacked. There’s nothing like that here. It makes me think that they were in a hurry or simply did not have the mind to leave something behind.”

He turned to Hailey.
 

“We’re taking a break to refuel on water and food. After that, I want you down here in your wolf form. We’re going to start moving slowly to prevent ourselves from missing anything.”

“And me?” asked Piers.

“I still want you in the air. If something happens to me, I want you ready to take Hailey out of here.”

Piers nodded. The three of them sat down to eat, by silent consensus staying away from the wrecked campsite. After they were done, Kieran went to clean it up, taking what supplies survived and piling the rest together so that the site would not be so obvious.

This time, when Hailey took Kieran’s hand, she could access his power with even more speed than she normally did. It was almost a heady feeling, having it right there. There was something powerful happening. She had never taken power from anyone as often as she had taken it from Kieran.

In her wolf form, she cast around the area carefully. Now she could tell that there had been a man at the site. His scent was the strongest, but the other scent that she found confused her badly. Her wolf brain tried to put it in a way that her human mind could understand, but it was at a loss.
 

Water. Blood. Bad. Old. Rot.

Hailey shook her head as if to get the scent out of her nose. For a moment, all she could think to do was to sit up and howl in a panic. Whatever had taken the man, it was not human. It was not right, and her body twisted, trying to pull away from it.
 

She shook her head and twisted into her human form.
 

“There is something very wrong with whatever took this man,” she told Kieran. Piers was already far above, watching them closely.

“What do you mean?”

“Templars are men. I know they are because I’ve seen them die. This…I don’t know what this is. The wolf is telling me that it is bad and, more than that, wrong.”

Kieran frowned.

“Do you mean something like a mountain lion or a bear?”

Hailey shook her head in frustration, wishing she could explain.

 
“No. I mean something
wrong.
A mountain lion or a bear is not a good thing, but it makes sense. They’re just other predators who want the same thing that the wolf does. This…thing…is something else.”

Kieran nodded soberly.

“All right. Follow the scent, but stay close to me. I don’t want to lose sight of you.”

She took his arm again, and when she felt strong, she returned to her wolf form. She forced herself to be calm, and so she set off after the scent of the man who had been carried away.

There was a brief moment where she could smell another wolf, a scent which confused her. Wolves were actually a rarity in the mountains of Europe. In many regions, they had been hunted to extinction. She knew this was true. Some of the men she had known in the Angioli coven in Italy even spoke of the old wolf hunts.
 

All of that was true, but she could definitely smell the scent of another wolf here. The scent was fresh. She supposed that there must be long holdouts, wolves that hid so well that they bred in secret populations throughout the mountains.

She put the thought to one side. Instead, she put her nose to the ground and started casting about for the scent. As she had feared, the
wrong
scent that she had detected was wrapped with the scent of the man who had been taken away. The two scents twined around each other, telling her that they were moving in the same direction.

There was one comforting thought that occurred to her as she followed the trail at least. As time wore on, she became more convinced that the man was alive. He might have been unconscious or otherwise immobile, but he was definitely alive.
 

The trail was not a direct one. It wove through the forests, following a path that she couldn’t discern. Sometimes it doubled back on itself. She wondered if the thing was afraid of being tracked or caught. As she followed the trail, Kieran followed her closely, though he stood back whenever she needed to sort out the trail. He knew that she needed him not to foul the track with his own scent, but he was always right behind her.