Half Truths (A Helheim Wolf Pack Tale) (29 page)

‘You don’t
deserve
me?’ she asked in an incredulous hiss. All that he’d said, and that was what
she picked up and ran with. He pinned her with his mismatched gaze and raised
his eyebrows at her.

‘Do you remember
when I told you I couldn’t afford to leave this place?’ She nodded. ‘It was a
lie. I
can’t
leave this place Ind. Whenever a wolf is born with a
defect, they’re killed. But my father wouldn’t allow it. He kept me even though
a warrant was drawn up that said if I leave Helheim land to start my own pack,
I’m to be killed. I can’t ever leave this place, Indi. I’m like a second-rate
citizen in my pack. This farmhouse is the only safe place I’ve got.’

Indi’s
expression hardened, on the verge of arguing with him again, but his phone
began to vibrate on the nightstand. Glancing over, he saw the unknown number
calling and picked it up.

‘Rhett?’ Leona’s
voice was thready with panic.

‘What?’ he
snapped. Rhett looked at Indi as he spoke. She was pressing her thumbs lightly
into her eyes. The dark circles were back again.

‘I’m here, at
the farmhouse. I have more information about Eaton. Will you meet me?’

‘Where are you
exactly?’

‘By the gates,
in the woods where I met you before.’

He ground his
teeth. ‘Fine. I’m coming.’ He turned back to Indi. ‘I have to go—pack business.
Stay here. I won’t be long.’ He braced himself for the argument that never
came. Indi nodded, lay down and rolled over onto her side.

Rhett stared at
her irregularly rising and falling chest, hating that she had deteriorated so
much. He had to find her a fresh source of blood and soon.

Throwing the
sheet from his body, Rhett slid off the mattress and rifled through his drawers
for some clean clothes. When he was dressed, he stalked out of the house; his
boots crunching on the crust of ice that had formed over night. His breath
smoked out in front of him. He shoved his hands into the pockets of his coat
and cursed Leona for getting him out of bed so fucking early.

He approached
the front gate of the farmhouse boundary slowly, allowing his wolf to sniff out
whether Leona was alone or not. Just as before, she’d come alone. He launched
himself over the wooden fence, landing with a muted thud onto the frozen
ground. Through narrowed eyes, he scanned the forest around him. A small
movement caught his eyes to his left; Leona emerging from under the brush in
nothing more than leather pants, a black tank top and a biker jacket.

‘You look like
shit,’ he told her.

‘Rhett, I—’ her
eyes widened, the colour draining from her dark skin. Ashen, she took a shaky
step back, edging closer and closer to the cover of the trees. She seemed to be
focusing on something over his shoulder. He looked. A 1965 Buick LeSabre was
meandering down the gravel road heading towards the farmhouse. The Seer was
here. There was a young guy driving the car; the Seer riding shotgun. Her white,
wispy hair was tucked under the hood of her dark robes. Rhett bowed
respectfully as the car passed, and when he turned back to Leona, she was gone.
He spat a curse and marched into the woods where she’d come from, but she was
nowhere to be seen. Her trail was leading away to the north, but there was no
fucking way he was going to chase her.

 Rhett backed
out of the underbrush, figuring that Leona hadn’t wanted to risk having any
witnesses seeing her. Along with killing kin and feeding vampires willingly,
defection and abandoning your pack was high up on the heavy punishment list.

He was walking
up the porch steps when he heard Antain calling the pack’s enforcers together
into his office. Kicking the slush from his boots on the door frame, he walked
into the office last, shutting the door behind him.

Sabel and Colton
were leaning against the wall on either side of the sofa where Antain was
sitting; Vaile sitting ramrod-straight beside him. The Seer was sitting in his
alpha’s office chair behind the desk. The young guy who had been driving was
standing to her right. His expression was serious—hard almost—like he didn’t
like being there.

‘Antain of the
Helheim Pack, I have come here to discuss your félvair,’ said the Seer in her
painfully rasping voice.

Antain nodded
once before raising his eyes to the man at her shoulder. ‘And why should we
discuss such things in front of him?’ he asked, inclining his head a little
towards the silent shadow.

The Seer’s
sightless eyes took in every single wolf in the room. ‘Helheim pack, this is my
grandson. I’m training him to take over when I pass. He has the Gift.’

Antain nodded.
‘What is it you would like to know?’

The grandson
cleared his throat loudly, attracting every set of eyes to his face. ‘The word
on the street is that Buxton is having a little vampire problem,’ he said. His
voice was thick like molasses.

Antain looked at
the boy. He was probably no older than sixteen or seventeen with the same white
hair as his grandmother, but it was shaved close to his head. His narrowed eyes
were as black as midnight. ‘What’s your name?’ asked Antain.

He raised his
chin a fraction. ‘Zaine, with an “i”,’ he replied curtly.

Antain smiled
civilly at him, and Rhett wondered when—if—he was ever going to have that kind
of patience with snotty-nosed little punks like Zaine-with-an-i. ‘Zaine, I
challenge you to find any major city without a vampire problem. We are keeping
on top of it.’

‘That’s not the
impression I get. I’ve heard about these so called “Marked Murders” down at the
gothic club, “The Imp and Impaler.” From the details given, it sounds as if we
have a vampire working his way through the human population, carving them up as
he goes.’

Antain looked
over at Vaile. The alpha’s beta cleared his throat, drawing the kid’s attention
to him. ‘We don’t know for sure that they’re vampire kills. I’m—’

‘What makes you
so sure they’re not?’ Zaine interrupted, earning him a glare from Vaile that
could make your balls shrink.

‘As I was
saying,’ he said tersely, ‘I’m the detective on the case. There’s something
we’re missing. I just have to figure out what it is.’

‘The bodies have
been drained of blood, their throats slashed to hide the fang marks. It’s a
method they’ve used since the beginning of time.’

‘There’s more to
it than that,’ Vaile replied through gritted teeth. Rhett saw the muscle in his
jaw jump. ‘But let me assure you both, we’ll get to the bottom of this soon.’

‘And what of the
félvair? Is she safe while the town she lives in is being overrun by vampires?’

Vaile edged
further off the couch, looking like he wanted to strangle the kid. Antain laid
his hand of Vaile’s shoulder and gave him a look. Vaile sat back in the sofa,
keeping the mouthy sonofabitch in his line of sight.

‘You don’t have
to worry about her. She is here with us now.’

‘Really? I would
like to meet her, Antain,’ said the Seer, speaking for the first time in a few
minutes. The sound of her voice grated on Rhett’s eardrums like nails down a
chalkboard. ‘And your lovely mate, too.’

‘They’re out
shopping together,’ Antain covered smoothly.

‘So early?’ she
asked.

‘They’re both
early risers, Seer. But I’ll tell them both you asked after them,’ he said with
a smile.

She nodded.
‘Thank you.’ She turned her head a little in her grandson’s direction.

‘That’s all.
We’ll take our leave now,’ Zaine said, helping his grandmother stand and
sliding her cane into her hand. Antain stood first, followed by the other
enforcers. Antain walked the Seer out—Sabel trailing after him like his shadow.
Vaile leaned back in his chair, stretching one arm out across the back of the
sofa.

‘I want to tear
that little punk’s heart out,’ Vaile rumbled under his breath, squeezing the
bridge of his nose and closing his eyes.

‘Any more leads
on the case?’ asked Rhett. Vaile shook his head. Antain and Sabel came back
into the office; his uncle wearing an expression of relief.

‘We can’t keep
lying to her. She’ll find out that Eaton has been taken, or worse, that Indi is
not surviving in her new life.’

‘Yeah I wanted
to speak to you guys about that,’ Rhett murmured, looking down at the plush
carpet in the office. ‘She’s getting weaker. I mean really weak. Antain
suggested that giving her bagged blood is doing more harm than good. Perhaps we
need to try blood from the source.’

‘And where the
fuck are we supposed to find a human willing to offer their jugular to a
vampire?’ Sabel asked snidely.

‘There must be a
human who knows about us, but who is sworn not to say a word,’ Antain added in
a calm voice. He was at the sideboard, pouring himself a glass of whiskey
despite the early hour.

‘There aren’t
any humans who know about us. It’s forbidden to tell them,’ said Colton.

‘Unless we mate
with them,’ Vaile corrected, sitting forward in his seat. ‘What about Laithe’s
wife?’

‘Natalie?’
Antain asked from over the rim of his glass. Vaile nodded. ‘It’s worth a try.
I’ll call Laithe later on and see if he’ll allow his mate to feed Indi.’ Antain
turned his attention to Rhett. ‘We also have to plan a way of getting Eaton
out.’

He nodded. ‘I
agree. I say we go tonight before they have a chance to move her.’

‘But what if
Marcus has already moved her?’ Colton asked.

‘Not possible.
We only found her last night. They wouldn’t have moved her right away,’ Antain
rumbled, his eyes slipping to his wolf’s for a long minute. ‘They’ll wait until
the cover of darkness to move her.’

‘Okay, so we’ll
head out there tonight,’ Rhett said. ‘Vaile and I will go as the primary team,
Sabel and Colton can be in the secondary team if we need help.’

‘Fuck you,
Rhett. I’m going in first,’ Sabel snarled.

‘This is my
fucking show, Sabel. I swore to get her back and I’ll be damned if you dictate
to me how we’re going to do it.’ Sabel’s top lip curled back from his teeth.
‘You’re in the secondary team,’ Rhett repeated, giving him a hard look. He
turned back to look at the room. ‘We’ll leave at sundown.’ He stood up and left
the room. With the door shut behind him, he slumped against the wall next to
the office since that fucker Sabel had broken the bench that used to be there.
They were so close to getting Eaton back now. The words of his past surfaced
gently, but he shook his head to chase them away. He could do this. He could.

With a growl in
his throat, he grabbed the keys to the Jetta from the dish by the door and left
for work.

Vaile parked his unmarked in a spot
close to the entrance of central command and got out. He’d slept so deeply last
night—the exhaustion from his run and more than likely a case of
indigestion—sucking him under and holding him there until his eyes cracked open
again that morning. It was probably a fucking good thing though. It meant that
he didn’t have to think about Grey in compromising positions again.

After the
security screen, he made his way upstairs, knowing there would be a fuckload of
work for him to do which suited him just fine. He turned at the top of the
stairs, walking into the office he shared with a dozen or so other detectives
and froze. Grey was already here. Her bag was tucked under the desk, and a
sweater that would smell like her was hung over the back of the chair.

He fought the
urge to turn around and just walk away, forcing his legs to move again and take
him to his desk. Shrugging out of his holster, he slung it over the back of his
chair and parked it in front of his computer. While it loaded up, his gaze
strayed to Grey’s desk. Her computer monitor was blinking orange at him, so she
hadn’t woken it up yet. She must have just beaten him there.

Just then his
boss’s door opened, the scent of roses drifting out into the room. Vaile’s
blood pressure spiked. He didn’t like the idea of Larissa being alone in a room
with another male. She came out of the room; her expression solemn. His boss
was following her, his gaze searching the desks until he found Vaile.

‘Wolfe. In my
office. Now,’ D’Angelo snapped.

‘Ah fuck,’ Vaile
muttered under his breath. Larissa must have told him about what had happened
between them last night. She was going to get his ass fired. He didn’t move
until Larissa sat down next to him, straightening the non-existent creases from
her uniform. She was avoiding his eyes, and it was so painfully obvious he’d
done exactly what he hadn’t set out to do: hurt her.

‘Good morning,
Grey,’ he said, waiting to hear her voice again. Sure, she wasn’t screaming his
name, but her voice would still light up his day. He was such a fucking pussy.

‘Good morning,
Vaile,’ she replied softly, rolling the mouse to wake her monitor up. He stood
up and walked into his boss’s office, shutting the door behind him.

‘How’s the case
going?’ he asked. ‘I’ve got the Mayor calling me asking for updates. He’s
making my asshole itch.’

‘It looks like
it’s heading towards a cold case. We haven’t been able to ID a person of
interest yet, and they look like the answer to all the questions that have been
thrown out.’

‘You get
anything from forensics?’ Vaile shook his head. ‘You think this guy will stop?’

Vaile raised a
shoulder. ‘So, what do you want to talk to me about?’

‘ME’s assistant
called me fucking late on Saturday night. He said that you and your lovely
partner were down at the morgue tearing the place up.’

Vaile’s lips
jerked up in the corner. ‘I was chasing a lead. I thought we missed something
on the first pass with the bodies.’

D’Angelo
steepled his fingers under his chin and just stared at him. ‘That’s what Grey
told me too. I’ll tell Briggs he can fuck off with his complaint. You’re my
best detective Wolfe. I’ve got your back.’