Obsession Untamed (4 page)

Even the visions were useless. That first one had been so clear he’d really thought they might help him. But only in that one, when he’d watched the dark-eyed beauty die had he seen the death as if through the eyes of the clone. Ever since, he’d seen little more than vague faces contorted with terror. Nightmarish wisps with garbled sound. No details. Nothing to tell him where the killings were taking place. Nothing to help him catch the bastard.

He slammed the empty Budweiser can on the counter so hard that he crushed it.

Hawke lifted one dark, winged brow.

“I’m in my skin!” Tighe snapped, reading his friend’s expression all too well. “You can’t blame me for being frustrated.”

“No one’s blaming you, buddy. We’re watching you. But we’re not blaming you.”

“Great.” Watching him lose control, minute by minute. Tighe reached back into the fridge and pulled out three more beers, tossing one to each of his companions before turning on the old television in the corner to see if there was any news. He had a morbid need to know the identity of the dark-eyed woman he’d watched die. So far, there’d been nothing about her in the news. Maybe because she was FBI.

Already, she was haunting him. He’d barely gone an hour without thinking about her, without her face rising into his mind’s eye, those rich mahogany eyes flashing with fury and fire as she’d met her death. Why he was so obsessed with her he couldn’t begin to guess. Yeah, she’d been beautiful. And a fighter, which was admirable enough. But she’d been human. And he didn’t give a rat’s ass about humans.

Especially dead ones. And with their short, fragile lives, they were all basically the walking dead.

Damn, but he wanted this to be over. He wanted his soul intact so he and his companions could concentrate on the true threat, the apparent Mage plot to free Satanan and his Daemon horde. If therewas a plot. They didn’t know what in the hell was going on.

Hawke’s brows drew down. “What’s with your eyes, Tighe?”

“The black streak?” He’d noticed it in the mirror that morning, a single black streak cutting across his green iris from pupil to outer ring. “Beats the hell out of me.” Frustration simmered inside him, refusing to be distracted. He slammed his fist on the counter. “Where is that son of a bitch clone? For all we know, he could be halfway to Texas by now.”

Kougar gave a pull on his Bud, his pale eyes shining over his mustache and goatee. “I wouldn’t put it past him. The bastard’s different than the other clones. Smarter.”

Hawke nodded. “He may be evolving.”

“What do you mean?” Tighe asked warily.

“If I’m right, he’s going to become smarter and more clever every day until he’s nearly your equal.”

“Goddess forbid. While I degenerate into a raving lunatic.”

Hawke shrugged. “He was the only one who escaped the battle when they were all but defeated. Then he ditched your Land Rover in McLean and stole the cars of each of his victims, one after the other, making him impossible to follow. That’s clever. As is the fact that he’s staying away from the Therian compounds despite the fact Therian energy is his natural food. He’s having to kill human after human to feed himself because he knows the Therians are watching for him.”

“Yeah, and maybe he just enjoys the killing,” Tighe grunted. “If I could get another real vision, maybe we could stop…” As if Nature heard his
plea, his sight went suddenly black. “It’s happening again.” As he was swept into another place, he grabbed for the kitchen counter and held on.

Confusion clouded his mind as he stared into the face of the dark-eyed beauty who’d been haunting his thoughts all day and night.She wasn’t dead . He watched her in the mirror of a public bathroom, as if through her own eyes. She leaned in closer and pulled open the collar of her white blouse, revealing an oval of red welts on the otherwise-flawless olive skin of her long, graceful neck.

Teeth marks.

The clone had attacked her, yetshe 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 hisvisions .

“Agent Randall?” A second woman appeared in the bathroom mirror. An older woman of Asian de
scent 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 asshe 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 sonot on her wish list.

No, that was a lie. She’d take anything, even this god-awful sight, if it helped her catch the killer.
Unfortunately, none of the murders she’d seen so far had given her a single lead to go on. And each time she got one, she saw less. And hurt more. She’d nearly passed out from the last one.

“Leaving already?”

Delaney’s gaze swung to her boss, who was walking past with a Georgetown Hoyas coffee mug in his hand. Phil Taylor was in his fifties, with a body that was no longer fit, a mind that was as sharp as ever, and eyes that saw way too much. Which was annoying as hell sometimes.

“It’s after seven, sir. You know this is working late for me these days.” She smiled at him, trying to paste a look of serene innocence on her face. “I took your lecture to heart. I’m a fifty-hour-a-week worker these days. Not a minute more.”

Phil chuckled. “And I’m the Easter Bunny. Come into my office for a minute before you go, Agent Randall.”

Delaney didn’t bother to muffle her groan as she fell into step beside him. Phil knew she hated his fatherly lectures. He was a good guy, and genuinely interested in the mental and physical well-being of his agents, which made him an excellent boss. But she was sick to death of his warning her to put her job in perspective, get a life, etc., etc. She was the only one he hounded to be a littleless dedicated. Then again, she was the only one he’d found still at work when he’d come into the office at 2:00 A.M. three mornings in a row.

She wasn’t in the mood for another lecture. Not tonight. Not when her superpowers could hit again
at any moment. Another groan vibrated in her throat. Now wouldn’tthat guarantee her an appointment for psych eval?

“You don’t look good, Delaney.” Phil closed his office door and went around his desk.

“Gee, thanks, boss.” As he took his seat, Delaney perched on the edge of the chair across from him as if she only had a minute.

Phil waved his hand. “You know what I mean. You’ve got circles under your eyes. You look pale.”

“It’s early spring in D.C. Everyone looks pale.”

“True, but not everyone was attacked by the D.C. Vampire, though at the rate things are going, that might yet change. You were damned lucky to have lived to tell the tale, Delaney.”

“I know.” Just before she’d passed out, she’d heard the crack of a gunshot and felt her attacker jerk and flee. Someone had shot the bastard and saved her life, though her savior hadn’t come forward. None of the residents claimed to know who had done it, though she suspected one of the tough guys she’d put in charge might have followed her down. The only person she’d been able to thank for her life was the EMT who’d administered CPR and gotten her heart started again.

By the time the cops and Feds had arrived on the scene, there’d been no trail of blood to follow. Not a drop, even though she knew she’d shot the killer as he lunged for her. Sheknew she had. As had her savior. So why wasn’t there any blood? It made no sense.

It was almost as if the manwasn’t entirely human, which was ridiculous of course. Vampires weren’t any more real than the Great Pumpkin. The only reason the killer had been dubbed the D.C. Vampire was because of his habit of leaving teeth marks, though decidedly human teeth marks, on his victims’ necks.

But the fact remained, nothing about the murders made sense. And she seriously hated mysteries.

Phil steepled his hands in front of his mouth, tapping his forefingers on his upper lip. “I want you to take a couple of days off.”

“It’s Friday. Taking a couple of days off at this point in the week is traditional, sir.”

“Smart aleck. Two days in addition to the weekend.”

“Un-uh. No way.” As if making her stay out of the office fourteen hours a day wasn’t bad enough. “I received a clean bill of health, remember?”

“We don’t know what he did to you, Delaney, but your heart stopped, in case you’ve forgotten. I’ve been keeping an eye on you today, and you’re not looking good. Whether you like it or not, youneed a few days to get your equilibrium back. Go visit family.” He winced as if he’d forgotten she didn’t have any. “Or just leave town. Get away from this place.”