There was a flash of alarm in Gabriel’s golden eyes, at least until he closed them again, his expression haggard. “He said you two were working together to create problems for me in Chicago.” He glanced at Nick. “He said he had proof you were going to use your family’s money to put yourself in charge of the Pack.”
Nicholas scoffed and looked away. “I would never. Never.”
“He is my brother,” Gabriel added quietly, frustration in his voice, as if willing Nick to understand why he’d trusted Adam, even if the story was a little too soap-operatic to be entirely believable.
“I assume he was trying to get you pissed at me and Nick,” I said. “Maybe so you’d incapacitate us or just take us out altogether. And then what?”
“And then he tries to take me out while you’re here—”
“And they’ll think I did it,” I finished for him. “Adam will take me out and claim he caught me in the act of killing you. And that’s the first shot in the war between shifters and vampires.” I softened my voice. “Gabriel, if you didn’t call me here, why else would he have arranged for me to come?”
While Gabriel considered my question, I considered the fortuity that had put me outside the House. What if I hadn’t been there? Would he have come into the House looking for Ethan? Would Ethan have been drawn into the trap?
“Did he tell you Ethan was in on it?” I asked.
Gabriel nodded. And then, as if the weight of his brother’s betrayal had suddenly hit him, his eyelids fell shut. “Dear God,” he said, shaking his head, as he puzzled it out. “You’re right—why else would he have arranged for you to come?”
“Could he have been behind all of it?” I asked. “Tony’s death? The attack on the bar? The convocation? The hit? I mean, he’s your brother.”
“I would assume that’s the motivation. He’s family. He’s in line for the position of alpha—but last in line. He must want the position, and I’m the current obstacle to that plan. Not the only obstacle, since Fallon and the rest of them fall in line before Adam, but a current obstacle.” He swore out a string of insults that reddened my ears and made Nick whimper from his spot on the floor.
“He killed an Apex, for Christ’s sake.” Gabriel crossed himself, two fingertips moving from head to heart, then across his chest, as if protecting himself from the karmic backlash that Adam’s mortal wound would have incited . . . or perhaps apologizing to the universe for it.
“He’s good,” I said quietly. “He never directly implicated Tony, but he pointed us in the right direction so that we implicated him ourselves.”
“Which made the idea that much more believable.”
I nodded, then glanced around. If Adam was still circling the block, waiting for Gabriel to take me out, we were going to need a plan, and fast. “Is there another way out of here?”
He shook his head. “There’s a fire exit, but it’s through the door on the other end of the bar.”
I blew out a breath, squeezing and resqueezing the dagger’s handle. We’d been set up, and some really, really bad shit was about to go down in this bar in Ukrainian Village.
Better yet, no one knew I was here, and I didn’t have a phone on me. Adam had a phone, the little shit, but a fat lot of good that was going to do me now.
I tried to slow the hammering of my heart and hold back the silvering of my eyes. I did not want to be stuck in the back of a bar with no exit. I felt like the stupid heroine in a horror movie, willingly walking into the lion’s den without phone or sword, now stuck in a family squabble between an Apex and his Cain-like brother.
Backup, I figured, was my only bet. I could call Luc or Ethan—or even Jonah—and report that Adam was trying to take us out. “Do you have a phone?”
“Behind the bar,” Gabe said.
As we glanced at the red leather door that led back into the bar, preparing to make our move, the bell over the front door rang.
“He’s back,” Gabriel said.
My effort to hold them back notwithstanding, my fangs descended and my eyes silvered. The blood began to rush through my veins as my body prepared for the fight.
“Sire?” Nick called out. “Please?”
Gabriel moved to Nick, put a hand behind his head, and pressed his lips to Nick’s forehead. He whispered something I couldn’t hear, but the words were low and earnestly spoken. Then Gabriel glanced back at me, as if my presence affected whatever answer he was going to give to Nick’s plea. “Shift,” he said, “and do it quickly. I don’t know how much time we’ll have.”
Nick closed his eyes in relief and began the slow process of standing.
“No vampire sees this and lives,” Gabriel said, his voice gravelly. “I allow it now because one of my own put you in this position. But you saw none of it.”
I nodded. Even if I hadn’t taken his words to heart, the expression in his eyes signaled clearly enough that he was trusting me with something momentous—the right to watch a shape-shifter work his personal magic.
“Sir,” I said, recognizing his authority. When Gabriel nodded and turned back for the door, the first line of defense against Adam’s coming attack, I risked a glance at Nick. He’d stripped off his T-shirt, revealing a fuzzy—but bruised—chest, and was pulling off his jeans. Not expecting the show—weren’t shifters supposed to rip through their clothes?—I turned away again, but not before Nick had caught me inadvertently peeking.
“It’s not entirely necessary to strip down,” I heard him say as fabric fell to the floor, “but these are my favorite jeans.”
I bobbed my head in understanding but kept my eyes averted.
“If you want to see it,” Nick quietly offered, “you’d better look now.”
The only vampire alive to see a man shift into . . . something? No way was I going to miss that.
I glanced back, catching the Full Monty of a very naked and well-honed journalist. He had athletic feet, long, lean calves, and firm thighs. His shoulders were strong, his arms muscular, but he was also bumped and bruised, cut and bitten. He’d clearly taken a beating at Gabriel’s hands.
Nick nodded, and then it began . . . and my mouth gaped open in shock. It wasn’t what I’d expected.
I’d seen Under world and the rest of the movies that detailed the transformation from human to wolf. I’d assumed the change was a physical one—a gory shifting of muscle and bone, an exchange of paws and fur for human skin and feet.
But there was nothing anatomical about this. I raised a hand to shield my eyes as light flashed around Nick’s body, a cloud of shifting colors as the magic—thick enough to take tangible form—swirled around him.
I’d always thought, as was the common vampire understanding, that shifters were like us—superpredators who’d come into existence as the result of a genetic mutation that altered the form of their bodies. That was not what this was, this gentle light and haze of color.
Shifters were predators only secondarily.
First, and foremost, they were magic—clean, pure, inherent magic.
Not like us.
Gabriel turned to face me, his amber eyes alight with predatory arrogance. But the emotion softened.
I shook my head.
“I’ve seen that look before, Merit. It’s neither as good nor as bad as you think.”
I looked back at Nick, who was still wrapped in the fog of it, invisible through the mist that cocooned him. And then the mist changed shape, from the tall, lean form of a man, to something low, something horizontal.
And when he padded toward me through that mist, low and feline, a sleek, black cat—cougar? jaguar? puma?—in the middle of a bar in Chicago, my heart nearly stopped. He was tall—his head high enough to reach my elbow, his coat so sleek and black he gleamed like velvet beneath the overhead light, his paws heavy, big enough to take a chunk out of a vampire, should he feel the urge. There was no mistaking his power. There was also no mistaking his health. Where Nick had been beaten and bruised, the cat was healthy. Maybe that was why he’d asked to shift, so that he could heal himself and lose the bumps and bruises.
And maybe that was why he’d had to ask—because Gabriel had prevented his recuperation.
They might have imagined themselves to be casual, relaxed, less strategic and anxiety-ridden than vampires . . . but there was assuredly a hierarchy in the shifter food chain. And hierarchy mattered.