“Drop the gun or I’ll slash his throat,” I growled. “I haven’t seen Mira. I don’t know where she is.”

“Are you looking for her?” Nicolai asked from his spot by the car. The blond lycanthrope hadn’t moved more than two feet during the entire scuffle. I hadn’t expected him to.

“No,” I said, and then frowned. “I wasn’t, but now it seems as if it is in the best interest of all those involved if I find the nightwalker.”

“Then why are you here?”

“The dead girl.”

“Put the gun away. This has gone too far already,” Nicolai declared. “Go open the doors. Let’s get out of here.”

“Nicolai!” Shawn cried, but he was already lowering the gun. “We’re not done.”

“We’re done,” Nicolai snapped. “He hasn’t seen her.”

“How do you know he’s not lying?”

“He’s not. He had no reason to.” A new wave of power brushed against my back for the first time, the smell of it darker and richer than the other two werewolves. I turned to see Nicolai’s eyes glowing a deeper copper and I tensed. “He hunted Mira and survived. If he had killed her, he would have admitted to it and then killed the three of us for the trouble. We’re done.”

The standoff lasted for only a few heartbeats but it was long enough to tense every sore muscle in my tired body. At last, Shawn dropped the gun on the ground and took two steps backward away from it. I quickly pulled the knife away from the neck of the lycanthrope that I was holding and backpedaled toward the car, leaving the man holding his side and rubbing his neck while he sat on the ground.

There was no doubt in my mind now. Nicolai had been the alpha of his last pack and Mira had forced him into an existing pack. This was not good. No pack was strong enough to hold two alphas. It always resulted in the death of one.

“Get in.” Nicolai’s low voice jerked me from my thoughts. I walked around the car and fell into the front passenger seat as Nicolai slid behind the wheel. Shawn jogged down and opened the steel doors. The older were had yet to move.

Squinting and blinking against the morning light, we rode back toward the city, leaving Nicolai’s fellow pack mates behind. The blond werewolf said nothing as we entered the city and he pulled the car back up to the curb where he had stopped me. By the clock on the dashboard, less than an hour had passed, but I still felt like I had been dragged behind a truck.

“If I find her, I’ll have her call you,” I offered as I grabbed the door handle.

“Just tell her to call Barrett,” he said, his hand rubbing his forehead. His eyes were closed and lines of strain dug furrows in his young face. Hunted by an Ancient vampire and trapped in a pack that already had an alpha. In the end, he wouldn’t be able to hide what he was. I didn’t envy Nicolai.

Wordlessly, I climbed out of the car and started walking back toward the hotel I was staying in. My eyes lingered over the spot where I had seen the girl just before the werewolves had stopped me. She said that there had been nothing like this in Savannah before. Did she already know about the vampires and the lycans? A part of me wanted to go track her down and find out what she knew, but it would be nearly impossible. One small human in a city filled with humans and angry dark creatures.

Shoving my hands into my pockets, I lowered my head against the wind that whipped down the street as I headed back toward the hotel. I didn’t need to look any further—the peace was starting to pull apart at the seams and Mira’s disappearance wasn’t helping. I needed to pry some more information out of James before I could continue.

The little Themis weasel had his phone turned off, sending me directly into his voice mail. However, he left me a message stating that he and Ryan were already on their way to Savannah. My instructions were to stay put until they arrived later that afternoon.

This was not the news I had expected, nor was I relieved. Ryan didn’t take little jaunts around the world on a whim. He had discovered that it was far easier to direct people if he remained in a single, central location—at Themis—and let everyone come to him. And they did.

It would be a few hours before they touched down and finally reached the city. I took advantage of the rare lull to shower and slip into bed. Despite all the chaos surrounding me, sleep came quickly, sucking me down into a swirling vortex of nothingness.

Not nearly enough time passed before I felt my thoughts surfacing again, pulling above the fog of sleep toward consciousness. Something or someone had wakened me. I lay there with my eyes closed, floating somewhere between sleep and consciousness, trying to remember where I was and why I needed to wake up. Someone was close. Where was I? Slowly I remembered that I was in the hotel. I paused. Had someone checked into the room beside me, the noise drawing me from sleep? That had to be it.

Exhaling, I let my mind drift back toward sleep. And then the bed moved. My breath caught in my lungs and my muscles stiffened, waiting for a sign that I had imagined it. I hadn’t. The mattress dipped and shifted under the weight of someone crawling into bed next to me. Adrenaline raced through me.

Slowly I reached out with my powers just to get a feel for whom or what was now lying next to me. It didn’t take much—the feel of the energy I brushed against was unmistakable. Vampire. Holding my breath, I stretched as if relaxing, reaching my right hand up under my pillow. My fingers closed around the hilt of a small knife. I wouldn’t be able to kill the monster with it, but it might buy me enough time so that I could grab one of my swords on the other side of the room.

Had I been asleep so long that it was night again? Where the hell were Ryan and James?

A small, cool hand lightly touched my ribs and slid up my chest to settle over my heart.

My eyes flew open when I rolled over to plunge the dagger into the creature’s chest. But the low growl lodged in my throat when I saw Mira lying beside me, an amused smile lifting her full lips while her red hair spilled across the white pillow beside me like a river of blood. In my surprise, she was able to easily grab my wrist and push me onto my back. She slithered on top of me so that she was straddling my hips, her luminous lavender eyes glowing faintly in the darkness. Holding my hand out over the edge of the bed, she gave it a little shake to get me to release it. I allowed the knife to fall. If Mira had wanted me dead, she would have killed me already.

Her powers flowed over me like a cool, summer rain. I fought the urge to let my eyes drift shut as the energy that poured from her washed away the last of my tension and anger. I knew she was a heartless killer, but there was something so clean and soothing about the caress of her powers. And to touch her was intoxicating.

“Oh, good,” she purred. “You want to play. James said you’d be too tired.”

“Get off,” I snapped, lying still beneath her. I tried to ignore the way her dark red hair fell around her pale face and over her shoulders. I tried to ignore the feel of her thighs pressed against my hips. Anything to keep my body from hardening beneath her. Her playful mood didn’t need to be provoked.

“I plan to. How about you?” she said with a wicked grin. She released her hold on my wrist and slid her fingers along the length of my arm back to my chest. Her other hand was splayed on my ribs and slowly moved higher to rest over my heart, pounding like a thing gone mad. Even without her keen hearing, I’m sure she could hear it.

With a gentle shove, I pushed Mira off of me and rolled to my feet, fighting the urge to shake my head. Mira couldn’t use her power to fog my thoughts or coerce me into doing something I didn’t want to do. Call it a natural immunity. Unfortunately, it didn’t make me immune to Mira herself. After three months apart, I had forgotten what it was like to be around her, and now I was drowning. Somehow the memory of her smile, her smell, her touch had all faded with time, but now that I was faced with her again, I found myself aching to touch her.