Chapter 25
"Have you changed your mind? I see now why you are such a lady killer. Left behind mucky boxers lying around? Women unkicked from your bed? Anything you need to clean up before inviting me in?" Kenzi's snark was a cover for a flare of fear split equally between that of an unknown threat and that of Dyson retracting his invitation.
"Nothing's changed, my mind included," the shifter shook his head, his sharp eyes raking the street, "Just caught a scent which shouldn't be here."
"Is it the usual dangerous or like super dangerous?" the girl was only half-joking as she tried to assess the level of hazard by peering into Dyson's frowning profile.
"Neither, more of the uninvited variety but I'll go check anyway. You stay put for the time being," the wolf tried for his most dismissive, turning and smiling into the taut little face, and reined in the irrational impulse to tug his gun out of the glove compartment – that would definitely ruin the nothing's-wrong message and spook the girl. He wasn't feeling threatened or particularly alerted, just mildly concerned at the freshness of Tamsin's scent in his neighborhood – there could be a dozen of nicely reasonable explanations – but he didn't fancy bumping into the feisty valkyrie with a no less feisty human girl at his side.
The wolf strode into the gym, his eyes peeled and ears pricked – one could never be too careful – and saw exactly what he had expected to see – the blonde sprawled on his low bed, her head and shoulders propped against the pillow, seemingly deep in perusing an old-looking parchment covered in ornate squiggles that looked like runes.
"Wonderful thing, these druidic spells – easy to cast, basic, supermarket-available ingredients, nothing fancy like newt's eyes or pre-pubescent rats' tails," she murmured without looking up.
"Not my department, if you have someone to shred or a throat to rip out, I'll be your guy first thing tomorrow morning, but now scoot," the wolf snapped at the woman who was supposed to be out of the picture and not lolling on the bed he had quite a different use in mind for.
"The art of friendly chat is dying," Tamsin gave an unconvincing chagrined sigh, "And here was me hoping for some good company for tonight and you're all business."
"As you so eloquently put it not long ago, we don't have much in common beside fucking," Dyson toned it down but was still a far cry from hospitable, "And I am not in the mood for fucking."
"At least, not in the mood for fucking me," the woman drawled, getting up gracefully, "Your little human whore holds more fascination for your penis, doesn't she?"
The wolf bristled as two things hit him almost simultaneously – Kenzi being called a whore didn't sit with him any better than the realization that Tamsin had somehow learnt about Kenzi at all.
"Come on, dogpants, tell me she's not a whore," the valkyrie was openly mocking as she took a half-step towards him, "A human barely out of her teens by the look of her, going out with an older man, kissing in public? The girl must be either a fae groupie or a little gold-digging slut? Have you shown her your fangs, Dyson, or were you too busy showing her the other parts of your anatomy?"
The shifter let the offence slide as he focused on what mattered – Tamsin seemed to know precious little about Kenzi or the nature of their relationship and should be kept that way.
"Must be you doing something wrong, if I had to look for a better thing with a human," he growled covering his relief with his patented glower, "and we haven't been intimate enough for her to see my fangs or any other unhuman attributes. Relax, Tams, she knows nothing about the fae."
The valkyrie's blank stare was no indication whether she believed him or not or whether that was any of her concern at all. And Dyson sensed something brewing underneath, something more than petty jealousy or suspicion, and his instinct sounded the alarm much quicker than his brain had time to process all the information his keen senses were supplying to him. The scroll in Tamsin's hand, her casual mention of druidic spells, her strong scent overlaying all the other smells in the gym, drowning them easily as there was nothing much to drown. Not a single smell, neither the stink of the sweat-shirt he had been punching the bag in for the last couple of weeks, nor the distinctive reek of a pile of empty takeaway cartons in his trash bin.
"What have you done, Tamsin?" his blue eyes landed on the blonde, who was innocently studying her nails, and swept the farther recesses of the spacious room, "Who is here with you?"
"Just a little smell-erasing spell for your welcoming party," Tamsin was grinning like a slightly malicious cat about to pounce on a mouse, "Wouldn't want to spoil the surprise."
Dyson was already mid-turn when something hit him in the back, something suspiciously close in weight to a well-balanced mace, and not of the spray can variety. Another blow fell on the back of his knee making his leg buckle under him. The shifter went down on one knee, his claws swishing around in a semi-circle and connecting to someone who let out a strangled yelp but a vicious kick to his other shin persuaded Dyson the attacker was far from a lonely fighter. The wolf swung madly around getting another of the unwelcomed visitors in the process and head-counting his foes. The single-digit number didn't do much to intimidate him but the familiar figure in black lurking behind the massive backs of the first-row participants was smiling and that Dyson didn't like one bit.
Vex pleading on his knees for mercy would be a welcome sight, Vex prancing around in his over-revealing outfits or giggling maniacally was more than slightly gross but still within tolerable but Vex smiling, calmly and confidently, was something to put Dyson on red alert and make him regret not bringing his gun to the fray. His regret deepened when a split second later the wolf saw the Mesmer raise his hand and point something looking suspiciously like a firearm his way.
"Please, Kenzi, drive away, hide, be safe!" the thought exploded in a silent exclamation as a bullet hit his chest and the light of consciousness started to dim.
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Kenzi was getting restless, she had already rummaged through the glove compartment and found nothing to entertain her curiosity, and her unoccupied mind wandered back to what Dyson had said to Taft in response to his pertinent question, "What are you fighting for? - For my people and for her." She had never put much stock in words but the wolf's actions did nothing to disprove his honesty. And the kiss, calming and arousing at the same time, passionate and sweet, came dangerously near to ultimately consolidate the impression she had got after being saved and helped by the wolf.
The warmth spreading inside the tiny human was doing the job better than any number of angora sweaters or comforters. Kenzi pulled her legs up to her chest and rested her chin on top of her knees, the car seat big enough to accommodate her small lithe frame in any position she felt like contorting herself into. For the first time in a very long while she wasn't having second thoughts, she wasn't nursing niggling doubts, she wasn't even trying to work out whose misplaced scent had sent Dyson scurrying to scout his own digs. The girl was simply basking in a rare, if not unique, feeling of certainty she was about to do something she would never come to regret with someone she would never have to feel let down by.
"Unless I was right about the mucky boxers," she muttered to herself and out of the corner of her eye caught a movement at the entrance to the gym. A tall blonde woman strutted out, her head held high, her gaze defiant, and made her way across the street to a car discreetly parked in a side alley.
"No way, Dyson is doing the kicking women out of his bed thing? Should I be flattered?" Kenzi instinctively slid down the seat to peek over the dashboard at the woman, who fortunately seemed too preoccupied to look around. "Can it be Tamsin? Beautiful but I thought she was brunette," Kenzi asked herself and a reckless idea struck her sending a deep blush up her neck, "Actually, what got me thinking Tamsin and the raven-haired lass of his delirious dreams was one and the same lass? Who knows how many brunettes the pooch has encountered on his torturous centuries-long fae way. And then there's also little human me, as raven-haired as they come."
Inspired by the hope and amused at the prospect of merciless teasing she was going to subject Dyson to, Kenzi was already lining up her best snarks specially for the wolf when the door to the gym swung open again and she saw a well-built man appear in the frame, shuffling forward, stooping slightly under the weight of a stretcher with another man holding the rear end of it. Both stretcher-bearers looked as familiar as did the figure sprawled limply on the stretcher and the girl suppressed a panicked yelp. The dark jacket and the jeans, the perpetually tangled blonde curls, the whole ensemble she had seen upright mere minutes ago and was now prone and lifeless and in a bad company of Lauren Lewis's thralls. Kenzi felt the cold creep back into her thin bones at the sight of the grotesquely-dressed and made-up fae she only knew all too well who followed the procession with a smug look on his pale face.
"Vex," Kenzi whispered, her panic rising and threatening to engulf her, "Dyson out cold, Lauren's guards around. There is so much wrong with this picture."
She saw them carry the stretcher to a van parked down the street and push the wolf unceremoniously inside with the overfed guards jumping in after him as Vex trotted to the car cabin to climb into the passenger seat. A minute later two more fae guards stumbled out of the gym, limping and obviously blooded, to join the party inside the van.
"Dyson didn't go down easy," the girl remarked automatically but that didn't seem to make for any sort of consolation.
"He isn't dead, he can't be," Kenzi told herself through chattering teeth, casting around for something to bolster her hope, "They wouldn't need the stretcher if he was, they wouldn't bother with removing the body if he was."
The girl slid further down the seat, her knees almost bumping the floor of the car, and stayed down until she heard the van speed down the street. Then she pulled herself back up, scrambled into the driver's seat and started the car with shaking hands. She didn't need to follow the wolf-nappers as she had a distinctly clear idea of where they were taking Dyson. What she had not the vaguest on was how to stop what she knew was coming.
Kenzi quickly worked herself up into quite a racing mode – her car racing down the streets as her heart raced inside her chest and her chaotic thoughts raced in her mind, she knew she would most probably be too late, she knew she had not a chance to avert the fate worse than death for Dyson, she knew whatever pleas, truths or half-truths she might come up with for her sister would not be enough to stop her. And above that all, she knew she couldn't give up on the wolf, she couldn't lose him no matter what happened to him. Life without him would be back to the mirthless, purposeless, hopeless existence she had been leading since the day her son died.
The girl braked sharply half a block away from the Lewis mansion and killed the engine, she threw open the glove compartment and pulled out the gun that lay, heavy and ominous, in her small hand. Their carefully crafted plans were going down the sewer, her strife to save her sister was losing points against what she knew she had to do to save someone who had somehow managed to become her lifeline.