A cry of alarm filled the tower.
Aidan was on his feet, bewildered, unbelieving.
He had met her once in the future, perhaps seventy years ago, and had not thought of her since then. Now he recalled a small woman with white powers, dressed in shapeless garments and ugly spectacles.
Why had he just heard Brianna Rose cry out in alarm? How had he just seen her frightened face so clearly? He had ceased hunting evil through time.
No other cries resounded, but he could feel darkness now, encircling her.
Tension riddled his body. He did not protect Innocence; he used it ruthlessly for his own means, for the attainment of power. He did not want to know what was happening to her. He simply did not care about other people’s problems.
She screamed.
It was a scream of fear and pain; he knew she’d been wounded.
He did not think. He leapt.
STILL DEVASTATED BY THE IDEA that Aidan had become the Wolf of Awe, Brie hurried down the block. Dusk was approaching and she knew she had better not be caught outside. The city wasn’t safe after dark and although the mayor’s curfew was voluntary, very few of the city’s denizens disobeyed it. Every shop on the street had already closed, except for the grocery store on the corner, and they were pulling their blinds.
She started to run. She couldn’t recall ever being this upset, not even when Allie had vanished into time last year. But she had known that Allie’s journey to the past was her Fate, she’d even seen the golden Highlander coming for her. This was entirely different.
The Book, handed down from generation to generation of Rose women, was very clear on the matter of Fate. It could never be defied by a mortal. Only the gods could rewrite it—and they never entirely did.
But sometimes events happened that were not in The Game Plan and the Gods corrected things when they went awry. Eventually, what was meant to be would happen.
Brie prayed that the historian she’d read had gotten all his facts wrong, or that her vision was wrong. She began to think that maybe she’d better go to Scotland and check out the tomb there, but she was really afraid of what she’d find. And why was her grandmother’s ring bothering her? It had always fit perfectly, but now it was pinching her.
Brie stared at the ring. “This is meant to happen, isn’t it?” she murmured.
Her grandmother had passed away a decade ago, at the ripe old age of 102. She’d been in full possession of her faculties right up until she’d taken her last breath. When she passed away in her sleep, Brie had somehow known her time had come and spent the night at her grandmother’s Bedford, NewYork, house. Sarah Rose had died smiling, and Brie often felt her presence.
She felt her now. “I mean, I could have felt all that pain and anguish last year or the year before—but I felt it now, for a reason. He needs me. I’m supposed to help him.” She thought about her crush. Had she become infatuated with him so she could help him? “Why else would I feel him so strongly?”
She felt her grandmother’s benevolence. If Sarah approved, Brie was on the right path, she thought. That only made her more determined to get into that Level Four file.
A shadow fell across the pavement directly in front of her.
Her heart seemed to stop with alarm. In a moment the sun would be vanishing beneath the horizon and the city would be lost in the gloom of the night. She’d never make it all the way to CDA.
A teenage boy stood in front of her, smiling maliciously.
He was pale, pimply and wore a long black cloak, marking him as a member of gangs who reputedly burned “witches” at the stake.
Brie breathed. “Get lost!” she cried, even though she was terrified. “It’s light out!”
“Not for much longer.” He snickered.
She tensed as three more teenage boys barred her way, all of them ghostly white, their lips nearly purple, wearing the same long black cloaks, as if they’d come from the Dark Ages.
She knew all about the ongoing investigation into these gang members at CDA. The “sub-demons,” or subs, as they were often called, were human, with normal DNA and very real identities. They were missing boys and girls, belonging to distraught family members, but, robbed of their souls, they were pure evil.
Brie whirled to run, and faced two more leering teens in black hoods and cloaks. She was in big trouble. She prayed that Tabby and Sam would sense it and come to her rescue. And simultaneously, she thought about Aidan. It was instinct. If he was near, he had the power to save her.
“She’s fat and ugly,” one boy said. “Let’s find someone else.”
Brie didn’t want to die, but she didn’t want anyone else to die, either. She glanced back over her shoulder at the setting sun and cried out. The sky was mauve now, the sun out of sight. In another moment or so, dusk would become night and she would be killed.
Brie tried to run.
They let her. She ran as hard and fast as she could, across the empty street, aware of them laughing with malicious glee. Hope began when she didn’t hear their footsteps behind her. She was going to make it. She didn’t know why they’d let her go and she didn’t care.
Suddenly three different boys appeared in front of her and barred her way, grinning. She tripped, crashing into them, but was seized from behind and pulled ruthlessly up against a lean and young male body. They had only let her go to torture her.
She fought wildly, writhing, her mind exploding into shards of terror. Her captor jerked on her so hard that something inside her snapped. Brie screamed in pain and fear.
The boy holding her laughed. The pimply-faced blond boy held a knife and he hooked it into her jeans, jamming it through the denim. She felt blinded by her terror. The steel met the sensitive flesh of her belly. He said, “Witch. You’re a real one, ain’t you? You reek of witchcraft!”
“No!” Brie begged. But she didn’t dare struggle now.
The boy glanced past her. His face paled and his eyes widened with alarm.
A low, long, very menacing growl sounded.
It was otherworldly.
Shaking, Brie looked behind her.
A huge wolf with blazing blue eyes crouched behind her and the boy, his hackles raised. Wolves did not exist in New York City. This one was oversized, demonic. Brie felt his huge black power.
And in that split second of utter comprehension, before it leapt, she met eyes that were human.
The Wolf of Awe had heard her.
The wolf snarled and leapt—at her.
She screamed, glimpsing enraged blue eyes, expecting the beast to land on her, dragging her down and mauling her to death. As her heart burst in terror, the beast somehow twisted and landed only on her captor, and she spun aside.
The wolf ripped the sub’s throat out and then, with a bestial roar, turned to one of the other boys.
They had guns and they started firing at the wolf as it drove another teen to the ground, savagely ripping him apart the way dogs shred stuffed toys. Brie was frozen in horror, but only for a single breath. She turned to run.
But as she did, the wolf raised his head, bleeding from its shoulder and its chest. It looked right at Brie with its eerily human eyes. Brie backed up, terrified. It leapt at one of the other boys and she did not think twice. As the sub-demon screamed, she fled.
She ran up the block as hard and as fast as she could, acutely aware of the snarling wolf behind her on the city street, making sounds she wished she could not hear. She somehow unlocked the front door of her building and ran inside. She didn’t even think to lock that door or use the elevator. She ran up the three flights of stairs to her loft and somehow unlocked her door, her hand shaking as if with Parkinson’s disease. Slamming the door closed, she speed-dialed Nick. Tears blinding her, she spoke before he could even answer.
“I think he’s here. He’s shot. He needs medical help, Nick!” She wept into the phone.
“Don’t fucking move,” Nick said, and the line went dead.
She dropped the phone, images of the vicious wolf as it destroyed the boys filling her mind. Subs or not, they were human. Sometimes, souls could be reclaimed when evil was exorcized.
Instead of calling Tabby and Sam, she silently begged them to hurry to her. And then she went still, paralyzed.
A huge power filled her loft behind her.
Brie began to shake uncontrollably. Slowly, she turned.
Aidan of Awe stood there.
CHAPTER THREE
HE WAS A MAN, NOT A WOLF, and he was bleeding from his gunshot wounds. His blue eyes blazed with rage and fury.
Brie cried out, pressing her back into her door. This man bore no resemblance to the Master she’d met last year and she couldn’t breathe, choking on fear. She looked from his beautiful, furious and ravaged face to his bloody body, utterly naked, and then at the gold chain he wore, the fang hanging on it. She inhaled. He was all hard, rippling muscle and his entire body throbbed with tension.
She tore her gaze upward. “You’re alive,” she gasped. “You’re hurt!”
His blue eyes were livid. “Never summon me again.”
His anger enveloped her. It was terrifying, for there was so much hatred in it. Brie shuddered. The power of his hatred made her begin to feel sick. She tried to shake her head. She hadn’t summoned him!
He was the Wolf of Awe.
What had happened to him?
The Wolf wanted blood and death. Brie felt the bloodlust. And she had seen the evil.
Her mind was reeling. “You’ve been shot.” She realized she was whispering. “Let me help you…Aidan.”
He snarled at her. “Come closer an’ see how ye can really help me, Brianna.”
He remembered her.
His mouth curled unpleasantly.
She exhaled harshly. She didn’t move, not convinced that he wouldn’t turn into that wolf and rip her to death. But he had saved her from the gang. If he was going to hurt her, wouldn’t he have done so already?
Her temples pounded with the pain of having taken in so much of his rage and hatred. Feeling faint, perhaps from uncertainty, she met his glittering blue gaze. His hard stare was cold, menacing. How could a man change so much in a single year?
She was terrified of him, but she was supposed to help him, wasn’t she? “You’re bleeding,” she whispered. “You could bleed to death.”
He barked at her, a dark, bitter laugh. “I willna die. Not yet.”
She tried to feel past the hatred and anger, the lust for more blood, but if he was weakened or in pain, it eluded her. He was probably too full of adrenaline just then.
She pushed the fear aside. She would not risk him bleeding to death. She turned and opened the linen closet, not far from the kitchen. She took several towels out and faced him. His gaze moved from the towels in her hands to her face.
The distance of a small kitchenette separated them. She started forward slowly, in case he tried to seize her, or worse, turned into the Wolf and leapt at her.
“Dinna!”
She faltered by the kitchen counter. “Here.” She held out the largest towel.
He looked even angrier.
Brie tossed it at him.
She thought he meant to catch it. Instead, he batted it away with one hand. Her gaze dropped of its own accord and she knew she flushed. “You need clothes—and medical attention,” she whispered, dragging her eyes upward. Their gazes locked.
“I need power,” he said dangerously.
Demons lusted for power. All evil did. Brie felt tears of fear and despair well. She somehow shook her head. “No.” That Wolf had been evil. That Wolf had destroyed those teenagers. How could this be her Aidan?
He suddenly turned and picked up the towel, his every movement filled with raw fury. He wrapped it around his waist. When he looked at her with his blazing eyes, he said, “They were lost.”
She trembled. He had just read her thoughts. “You don’t know that their souls couldn’t be reclaimed.”
He snarled at her.
“Are they all dead?”
“Every last one,” he said savagely, as if triumphant.
She wiped at her tears.
“Ye cry for the deamhan boys?”
She was crying for him. “No. I’m sorry. You saved me, and I’m judging you.”
It was a moment before he spoke. “I hardly saved ye, Brianna,” he said, so softly that her heart skipped.
Brie found her gaze fixed on his. Her tension changed. Desire charged through her body in response to his blatantly seductive tone.
He knew. He smiled. “Ye ran. I hunted ye here,” he said as softly.
He spoke as if he meant to take her to bed, not maul her to pieces. She became still, her body tight now, quivering, while fear surged. She began shaking her head. She wouldn’t believe it. She would never believe him capable of hurting her.
She prayed that he had not fallen so far into black evil that he could do such a thing.
But, dear God, she was standing face-to-face with the man she had just spent the past year dreaming of.
Brie wet her lips and backed up.
His lust escalated dangerously, changing. It overshadowed the anger, the hatred. The need to draw blood vanished. She began to feel dizzy, hollow and faint. Her heart was pounding so hard, it hurt. His gaze was on her face now, and the tension that throbbed between them seemed so charged, Brie thought the air might blaze.
Brie closed her eyes. So much emotion and tension were swirling in the room, she was becoming confused. She had to keep a grip on her mind. She couldn’t desire him now! He was simply too dangerous.
She fought for control, and when she opened her eyes, he looked oddly satisfied, as if he sensed her internal struggles. “Aidan, please sit down.” She swallowed, knowing she’d sounded like Tabby with her first-graders. “I can stop the bleeding until the medics get here.” Keeping up the pretense, she nodded toward the sofa.
He laughed at her. “Dinna speak as if I’m a small boy. Three bullets can’t kill the son of a deamhan.”
She went rigid. He could not be the son of a demon. Was this a bad, bad joke?
“Aye,” he said, growling. “The greatest deamhan to ever walk Alba spawned me.”
More tears rose. How could this be happening? “You’re a Master!”
“Damn the gods,” he roared.
She cringed, shocked. “They’ll hear you!”
“I dinna care!”
Brie did not move, searching his furious gaze. He hated the gods. She trembled, afraid for him.
His blue eyes changed, becoming brilliant now, blinding. “Ah, Brianna,” he murmured. “Ye care so much.”
His lust for power and sex made her reel. Her body fired on every possible cylinder, but she was also sickened in her heart. The rage and hatred, the lust, the frenzy of it all was too much for her to bear. “What happened to you?”
“Come here,” he said softly.
She tensed, instantly aware of what he intended.
“Ye want to come to me, Brianna.”
She did. She wanted nothing more, and suddenly she wasn’t sure why she was hesitating.
He started.
Brie thought his surprise was a response to her hesitation until her front door blew open and Nick stood there with his gun drawn.
Brie came out of her trance. Before she could scream at Nick, Aidan seized her, his strength shocking, fury blazing through him into her. Brie gasped as he pulled her up against his rigid body, her back to his chest.
Instead of feeling terror, a shocking sense of familiarity struck her.
When he spoke to Nick, his breath feathered the side of her neck and ear, leaving her breathless. “Do ye really wish to see if ye can murder me…afore I murder her?” Aidan taunted.
Brie clung to his strong forearm, which was locked beneath her breasts. His arm hurt her ribs terribly, reminding her that the sub might have bruised or fractured one of them. It was a welcome distraction from her conflicted senses, because she was acutely aware of his heart pounding slow and thick against her shoulder blades. Worse, he was only wearing her towel. There was no mistaking what was pulsing against her hip.
But, blended with the sexual desire she felt from him, there was murderous intention.
He seemed to hate Nick.
“Brie, don’t move,” Nick ordered calmly, his blue eyes the coldest she had ever seen.
“Nick, he saved me. Don’t kill him!” she cried, terrified for them both.
Aidan jerked on her, clearly wanting her silent. “Ye seem fond o’ yer little woman,” he said to Nick mockingly. “Mayhap she should have summoned ye to her side, instead o’ me.”
“Let her go. She’s an Innocent. You and I, we need to talk, calmly and reasonably, Aidan.”
Aidan’s answer was immediate. Brie cried out as Nick was blasted with blazing, visibly silver energy. Nick was pushed back against the wall as if by a huge gale.
She felt Aidan’s focus shift entirely to Nick. “Well, well,” he said softly, with great relish.
She was surprised. Demons could hurl their power so strongly that they’d send ordinary humans across entire football fields. HadAidan withheld his power with Nick?
She knew what he meant to do before he hurled another kinetic blast at her boss. “Don’t,” she began, but it was too late.
The silver lightning blazed into Nick. To Brie’s shock, Nick seemed to absorb the impact this time, reeling but remaining upright. He pointed the .45 at them and said dangerously, “I’m trying really hard not to blow your brains out. Oh, and I’m a dead shot.”
Brie gasped, “Aidan, we’re all on the same side. Please, don’t do this.”
Aidan nuzzled her cheek, which made her body explode with urgency. “I’m enjoyin’ myself too much to cease now,” he murmured.
Brie felt her body scream for his in spite of the terrible crisis. She somehow looked at Nick. “He is good, not evil, Nick. Don’t shoot.”
“He’s turned, Brie. He turned a long time ago. If you can’t feel the black power in this room, it’s because you’ve been brainwashed.”
Brie shook her head desperately. “No.”
Nick said, “Let her go, Aidan, and I’ll let you go.”
Brie knew it was a lie. So did Aidan, because he laughed. “Ye forget, Nick, I can leap away whenever I choose. Ye canna stop me. I stay here to war with ye because it pleasures me.” More silver energy blazed.
Nick grunted, going down to his knees, but he somehow kept the gun in his hand.
And Tabby and Sam appeared on the threshold of the loft, both of them breathless. As they halted, Sam’s favorite weapon appeared in her hand, a steel Frisbee with a dozen knifelike teeth. She could sever a man’s head from his body with it—a great way to bring even the purest demons down. But she said, in disbelief, “Aidan?”
“Sam, he saved me. Don’t hurt him,” Brie cried.
Aidan jerked her closer to his hard body. “Be quiet.”
Nick was back on his feet now. “How good are you with that thing?” he asked Sam.
“Good, but I won’t risk hurting Brie, too,” Sam said, never taking her gaze from Brie and Aidan.
Tabby, who was amazing in crises, now sank to her knees and started chanting a spell. The Book of Roses had been translated long ago from Gaelic to English, but her spells were always spoken in the language of their foremothers, which gave her magic all the power the Ancients would allow.
Aidan’s body filled with a new tension. Brie glanced up, and for the first time saw wariness reflected in his eyes.
He didn’t fear Nick or Sam and their weapons, but he feared Tabby’s magic. Brie instantly guessed her cousin’s intentions. Aidan could not be restrained with ropes, shackles or steel bars. Tabby intended to bind him with a spell, making him an impotent, virtual prisoner.
Aidan snarled and his grasp on her tightened.
“Don’t,” Nick snapped.
It was too late. Brie gasped as the force began. They whirled through the room, through the loft’s walls, through the building, across the city skyline. And then, as they were hurled with the speed of light through the atmosphere, past suns and stars, she screamed, the velocity ripping her body to shreds.
He did not make a sound.
HE HELD HER TIGHTLY, his senses furiously ablaze as never before. He was acutely aware of the woman in his arms—the Innocent he had leapt through time to rescue. As they landed, he instinctively shifted his body to break her fall. He did not know why he did so. He shouldn’t care if she was hurt.
She screamed from the impact anyway.
He welcomed the pain of landing on the stone floor.
He had leapt time, against his own will, to protect her from evil. He had just served the gods.
His rage increased.
They had landed in the tower room, which remained in absolute darkness. She wept in his arms now, sobbing from the torment of the leap through so many centuries, her body atop his. He was acutely aware of her torment.
He did not want her in his arms. He did not want to feel her pain or be aware of her body. He hated her hair in his face. And he hated her for what she had done to him.
When he had forsaken the gods, he’d done so by spilling his own blood all over Iona’s holiest shrine, where the Brotherhood lived. His defiance was written in blood and death, and not just his own. He’d poured the blood from the Innocent at Elgin all over the shrine, too.
“Ye canna walk away from yer vows.”
Aidan knelt in the blood of his victims, breathing hard. “Get away,” he warned the greatest Master of them all—MacNeil, the Abbot of Iona.
MacNeil came closer. “Yer in grief. I’m sorry, Aidan, sorry fer what was done.”
“What was done?” He leapt to his feet, enraged. “Do ye speak of my son’s murder at my own father’s hands? Did ye see the murder in yer precious crystal? Did ye ken Moray would come an’ steal his life from me?”
Tall, muscular and golden, MacNeil looked at Aidan with compassion. “I canna see all, Aidan. Ye must let Ian go, lad.”
“I will never let him go!” he shouted.
“His death was written,” MacNeil began, clasping his shoulder grimly. “In time, ye’ll ken the truth.”
Aidan wrenched away from the man who had chosen him. “Written? Is that why the gods wouldna let me leap to save him? Did they block my powers so my boy would die?”
MacNeil did not answer. It was answer enough.
“Aidan?” Brianna breathed.
He jerked, shocked that such a painful memory would dare to claim him again. He had just served the damned gods, he thought, as if Ian hadn’t been taken from him.
“Aidan?”
He turned to stare into a pair of beautiful green eyes, framed with lush, dark lashes. He felt her heart now, beating against his, and he was so aware of her it was almost as if he’d never held a woman before. A vaguely familiar tension began as he stared at her, along with a flutter of anticipation. It had been so long that he could barely recognize the sensation, and he was confused.
Did he desire her sexually?
His hands were on her waist. Beneath the baggy garments, her waist was small, with no flesh to spare. Their gazes held, hers wide, and he moved his hands up her rib cage, beneath her clothes, until her heavy breasts bumped them.
She gasped.
His manhood surged between them, against her belly. His mouth felt dry. He was tempted to touch her breasts.
His blood coursed even faster now. What was he doing? Although he had been shot three times and the leap was weakening, he had the ability to heal unnaturally and quickly. In a short time, his wounds would be gone. But her power could restore him instantly. Holding her, he could almost taste her power. He could take her now; she deserved such abuse for daring to interfere in his life.
