Page 85 of A Touch of Crimson
As the location of the noise became apparent, Siobhán said, “That’s the makeshift morgue.”
“Who’s in there?”
“Aside from the corpses of the two infected vamps? No one.”
The sound of glass shattering preceded a shout. “Let me out of here!”
They turned a corner into a short hallway that ended with a single door. A masculine face stared out through the broken window, amber eyes glowing with ire.
“Fuck you, Sentinels,” the man growled. “Either kill me or let me go. Don’t fucking leave me in here with a rotting corpse!”
“He was a corpse,” Siobhán whispered. “I shot him myself after he bit Malachai.”
Adrian didn’t take his eyes off the vamp in front of him. “He’s made a miraculous recovery.”
“But the other one is still dead…?”
“So is the one I caught. Turned into an oil slick, I was told.” He contemplated the seemingly cured vampire with narrowed eyes, the tempo of his heartbeat accelerating as he considered the possibilities.
“One of these things is not like the others,” he murmured. “The only difference being…what? The ingestion of Sentinel blood?”
Siobhán made a choked noise. “Shit.”
Yeah, deep shit.
“Are you feeling better?” Elijah asked as he watched Lindsay exit her adjoining bedroom.
He sat at the small desk in his suite, working on his laptop and trying not to feel like everything was closing in on him. That was pretty damn difficult, considering the wariness with which the Sentinels were watching him and the expectation that weighted the gaze of every lycan he crossed paths with.
Everyone was waiting for him to make a move, one that would rip apart the well-oiled system that kept mortals blissfully ignorant. One side wanted to defuse his perceived power, while the other wanted him to blow up like a powder keg. He was fucked coming and going.
“Dude.” Lindsay shook out her wet curls with her hands. “Did you get that vitamin water I asked for?”
“It’s in your minifridge, Your Highness.”
“Good grief.” She stared at him with exaggerated shock. “Did you just make a joke?”
He refrained from smiling. “No.”
“I think you did.”
Elijah looked back at his laptop screen. He liked her. And after the multiple times she’d gone out of her way to save his sorry hide, he thought of her as an ally. He didn’t have too many of those, which was why he’d been speechless when she’d said they were friends. Somewhere over the days he’d been guarding her, he had stopped thinking of her as just a principal and started thinking of her as just Lindsay. He was more relaxed around her than he’d been around anyone in a long time, because her friendship came without strings or expectations.
She was crazy and fun, and blunt to a fault. She was just goofy enough to reveal that she hadn’t socialized much as a kid. Like him, she probably had a very small group of people she trusted. He wondered if she’d ever shared her gifts with anyone else. Hell, why did she have them in the first place? She was a great big question mark, and everyone wanted a piece of her. And it was his job to make sure no one, but Adrian, got any.
She reappeared a moment later, swigging from a bottle of some neon-colored liquid that boasted its nutritional content. “Ya know… I feel like I got run over by a freight train while suffering a hangover.”
The Sentinels had worked her hard all morning, so hard that Elijah stepped in a couple of times. They hadn’t liked that, but they knew Adrian would back him up. As for Lindsay, she’d put up with the brutal pace without protest, taking the occasional dirty hit and brushing it off.
The Sentinels clearly didn’t understand the significance of Adrian’s display of sexual dominance the day before, or they would have been more careful with her. Perhaps even Adrian didn’t understand the entirety of the driving need he’d felt to claim, mark, and possess her, a need aggravated by her attempt to get away.
Female lycans knew better than to flee. Rousing the beast by denying him his mate wasn’t the smartest idea. Elijah had once assumed it was the demon in the lycan bloodline that made them so primal with their mates, but he’d been careful with Lindsay from the beginning, just in case. A smart move, if he said so himself.
Now it’d been proven that the angels were capable of the same possessive and wild carnality. Perhaps the angelic contribution to the lycan genetic makeup was the largest source of that near-violent covetousness.
Regardless, the lycans had gotten Adrian’s message loud and clear. Unfortunately, Elijah feared that the awareness of Lindsay’s importance to the Sentinel leader only made her more vulnerable. Those who whispered about rebellion had been looking and waiting for a chink in Adrian’s inviolate power, Elijah realized, and Lindsay was it.
Fuck. He scrubbed both hands over his face. How had he missed how fanatical the others had become? How long had Micah been filling the others’ heads with the pipe dream of freedom?
