Page 26 of Blood Sacrifice

“Only if you’re the one who catches it.” I shrugged. “Some might consider it romantic.”

“Nothing says I love you like a decapitated head.” Luna laughed again and for the first time in what felt like forever, a weight lifted off my chest. Her presence made it easy to breathe again, to have something other than hatred and anger in my life.

I swung my car into the underground car park of a building I owned, having invested in it when the area had been redeveloped a few years ago. It was one of the few benefits of longevity: being able to own property in various places for many years. All I needed was a good immortal lawyer who changed the ownership every sixty years or so.

“This is different.” Luna followed me from the car into the complex.

There were offices and residential units, of which I used a few while the others were rented out. All of this was connected toa different identity I invented about a hundred years ago that no one else knew about except the legal expert I used.

“I find it easier to own different types of property. Most wolves only want homesteads where they have room to shift in privacy. I have a number of properties like that, but I also have functional places like this.” I strode through the apartment until I reached the office at the rear. I had created a second username for myself on our system when we were upgrading it a few years ago and had new wolves joining the organisation. Luna appeared behind me as I logged in, and I noticed how pale she was after all the drama of today.

“Here.” I led her to the sofa I tended to stretch out on while reading reports. “I need to check what is happening after the explosion. You need to rest.” I felt her forehead to check if she was burning up.

“I’m fine.” Luna waved her hand to tell me to stop fussing. “We are an immortal species, which means the average that kills humans just slows us down. It’s why we survived all those boat journeys so long ago.”

She made a damn good point, but it wouldn’t stop me from worrying about her. The average human would have died in that crash with that head injury.

I used my other account, although it wouldn’t give me the level of clearance my original one would. There were reports from the crash, including the dead girl in the mortuary. Tarrack had matched her very well to Luna and had managed to get the body here in record time. There was nothing about the explosion at my home, which was unusual since it was in our area, and all incidents of a possible terrorist attack would be included on our radar.

I signed into the police system, and the explosion was there, allowing me to read updates in real time. That should have been in our system by now, which meant someone haddeliberately kept it out. No one knew that was my house except the person who set the charges.

“What did you see in your vision?” I asked, glancing up at Luna.

She was sitting with her head back and her eyes closed. Somewhere deep inside, I knew she was still alive. It was the reason I had never moved on, could never sustain a relationship. No one enflamed me the way she did, and it caused a physical ache in my chest that we had been deliberately separated by someone’s sabotage.

“Hmmm?” She sat up and opened her eyes. There was still a massive lump on the side of her head, and bruising under her eyes, but she had never looked more beautiful because she was alive and with me.

“Your vision,” I repeated. “Did you see anyone in it?”

Her brow furrowed as she concentrated. “Only a shadow, and then it shifted to when I saw the explosion and knew it was imminent.”

I sat back in my chair to watch her. “What did the shadow look like?”

She held her hand out. “Give me your hand and I’ll show you.” I did as she asked, sitting in the chair beside her. “Close your eyes.”

My vision darkened for a moment before everything shifted and I felt nauseous. The sun shone through the trees, creating shadows that stretched across the lawn. My house looked empty, although I knew Luna and I were inside because my car was parked in the driveway. I concentrated on the moving shadow, trying to ascertain who it belonged to. It was nothing more than a blob until it got closer to the house, and then it became a shape. The distinct shape of a wolf. It transformed against the wall, crouching low so they could usetheir fingers since our claws tended to do more harm than be dextrous.

Rage pulsed deep in my stomach as I struggled to suppress the urge to lash out at the creature even though what I was viewing was in the past and I wouldn’t be able to reach him. Over the years, I had tried to control the blood rage which was inherent in all dire wolves. We were stronger and faster than the other wolves, and each wolf tended to possess magical traits, as if there were magic users in our ancestry.

My nose twitched as a familiar scent caught my attention, and I tried to identify it. My claws flexed in and out, and my body froze when I identified the odour. It was a flower that I had only ever found in one location in this region, even if I didn’t know its name.

Peru bordered with the Amazon rainforest, and that luscious landscape was a place that was still packed full of a variety of creatures, both magical and mortal. The flower grew not far inside the forest in the shade on the bark of trees. I had been sent there as a soldier to collect young dire wolves and had stopped to study the tiny yellow flowers. I had noticed that the wolves who derived from that pack tended to exude that scent as if it was in their DNA.

The vision faded as the shadow moved away from my house.

How had I not detected them since my wolf was on high alert since Luna was injured?

“You’re blaming yourself,” Luna said, sitting back in the seat to study me. “We are dealing with an organisation that has lasted a thousand years, and evolved in that time to be devious and manipulative.”

It caused a lump to form in my throat because she had always possessed the ability to read me as if I was an open book. No one else had ever been able to detect any of my moods orintentions. She had been my unclaimed mate, and now it felt like the opportunity had passed for me to make her mine forever.

I stared at the wall and contemplated everything that had happened in the past few days, and none of it made a pleasant scenario. “I’m beginning to think that we’ve only scratched the surface of what is happening.”

“There has been an illusion in place for centuries to allow us to only see what they want us to,” Luna replied, shocking the shit out of me.

I moved my gaze to her. “Then what are we supposed to do? Continue to sit in the dark and believe the shit they’re feeding us?” I demanded, suddenly wary of everything.

Luna sighed and curled her feet under her in a gesture I remembered from her youth. “Honestly? I’ve spent years keeping witches off the radar of the people who seek to control our power. We live in communities cloaked by powerful enchantments so that we can’t be found. When we venture out, we wear amulets to prevent anyone from detecting our magic.” She held her pendant up as she spoke. “We don’t want to fight, merely being allowed to exist in this world.”

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