Tempting Evil (Riley Jenson Guardian #3)(37)

“Not from this distance.” I frowned. “Why don’t you just read his mind?”
“Some form of psi-deadener is blocking me. I could break through it easily enough, but it would warn him of my presence.”
“Then let’s get closer.”
“Are you up to going closer?” His touch moved from my back to my arm, his fingers sliding down my arm and under my elbow. I wasn’t wobbly enough to need support, but I wasn’t going to fight it, either. Not when the warmth that flared out from his fingertips seemed to keep the horror at bay.
“As long as I keep upwind of the building, I should be fine.” Though if I saw bodies, or bits of bodies, it would be a totally different story.
I’d seen death, in various incarnations, a few times over the years and it had never bothered me like this. I’d seen one wolf ripped apart by another, and hadn’t felt sick, much less puked. I’d witnessed Misha being eaten from the inside out, and though I’d been both horrified and sickened, I hadn’t come close to losing my stomach. But in all those times, I’d never tasted the death. Had never felt as if the souls of those who were dying or dead were invading me, filling me with their shock and anger and pain.
I wish I hadn’t felt it tonight.
I swallowed heavily and forced my feet to move, keeping my gaze on Moss more than what he was walking through. Or by. He stopped to talk to several guards who were hovering near the far edge of the remains. Moisture from the nearby sprinklers danced around him, covering him in a fine haze of silver. He either didn’t care or didn’t notice, but there was something in his very stillness that was chilling. Deadly.
Merle might have felt foul, but he didn’t scare me like Moss suddenly scared me. Just looking at him had trepidation running up and down my spine.
And I had to hope that the guard was right, that Moss and Merle didn’t share, because there was no way on this earth I could cope with getting sexually close to that man.
So how did my brother deal with it? He regularly used sex to get information about targets—used it and enjoyed it, no matter what or who he was doing. Was it merely the fact I was psychic and he wasn’t that gave him the advantage? If he’d been able to taste the foulness of the people involved, would he still be able to get intimate with them?
Somehow, I suspected the answer might be yes. Rhoan had never cared who or how many, as long as he was enjoying himself.
I’d always been a little more fussy—despite what Quinn might think. Though I guess there were huge differences in what a werewolf termed fussy and what a vampire with human sensibilities might. 
We circled the ruined sections of building, and began to edge closer to Moss and the guards, all the while keeping the shadows close and the breeze to our front so that it blew our scents away from, not toward, the men below.
“No, sir,” the shorter of the two guards said, his tone all military preciseness. “I saw no movement in the kitchen.”
“And yet you were the one who reported hearing steps?”
“Yes, sir.”
“How long before the explosion was this?”
“Ten, maybe fifteen minutes, sir.”
Moss swore and snapped his gaze to the second man. “And you?”
“I saw a heat signature in the kitchen, but by the time I got there, the person had left through the window.”
“And you didn’t give chase?”
“I saw no person, sir. Only a fox sniffing out the rubbish.”
Something in me stilled. A fox? Nerida was a werefox, and even a vamp couldn’t tell the difference between the heat signature of a real fox and that of a shapeshifter or werefox. He should have been able to sense the difference, but if he’d been more interested in getting back to bed, maybe he’d simply taken what he’d seen at face value.
And while I had no doubt that real foxes did scavenge around the bins here nightly, it just seemed a little too much of a coincidence that this fox was sighted so soon after the guard had sprung someone in the kitchen. Fact was, most real foxes would have scampered at the first hint of movement. They certainly wouldn’t have stayed there scavenging as a vampire approached. Most wild ones feared the undead almost as much as most humans did.
But what would Nerida be doing in the kitchen? Had she been involved in the explosion or was it merely a coincidence? Why would anyone want to blow this section of the house up, anyway? There was little here but the kitchen and dining areas, and the staff who ran them.
So what was Moss doing here? How’d he get caught in the explosion when he was supposedly talking to the new intake of guards?
“I want you to do a walk around the area. See if you can spot that heat signature again.”
The words were barely out of Moss’s mouth when I was dragged back then forced up the slight knoll and into a knot of trees.
“Why the hell did you do that?” I asked, shaking free of both Quinn’s grip and the shadows concealing my form as we stopped.
Quinn also stepped free of night’s cloak, and a lot more elegantly than me. “He was about to switch to infrared. He would have spotted us in an instant.”
“Given he wasn’t even facing us, there was plenty of time to move.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. Either way, it wasn’t worth the risk of discovery.” He paused, his gaze moving to the mess below us. “I think I’ll follow Moss for a while. If you find Rhoan, let him know I am here, and that I will contact him later.”
“If you kill Moss, they’re going to know this place has been infiltrated.”
His gaze flicked to mine, obsidian depths once again devoid of emotion. “I am not the amateur here.”
He had a point, but it was an annoying one. “No, you’re just the man hell-bent on revenge, regardless of the cost.”
“I will not do anything to jeopardize you or Rhoan.”
“That a promise?”
His hesitation was brief but nevertheless there. “Yes.”
I studied him for a moment, weighing his words, hearing truth and yet not trusting it. “I don’t know how much stock you vampires put in promises, but let me give one to you—if Rhoan gets hurt because your need for revenge overrides your vow, I’ll make you pay for it.”He didn’t say anything, just turned and walked down the hill, the shadows again taking him from sight as he neared the end of the trees.
I rubbed my head wearily, and let my gaze roam across the smoking mass of rubble and partial walls below. Moss was across the far side now, talking to other guards. The first two were walking around, heading my way as they scanned the area. Time to get moving, before I was spotted.
I padded through the trees, keeping to the deep shadows and away from the occasional flickers of moonlight. I didn’t have the cloak of night wrapped around me because my head was beginning to pound, and it would take more energy to hold the shadows close than I really had right now. So hitting moonlight when my skin was basically lily white wouldn’t be a good thing. As I drew away from the wreckage and closer to the whole sections of the house, I noticed a small gathering of people standing or kneeling in a group near the front of one of the main doors. A heartbeat later, a tingle of awareness ran across my skin, and my heart leapt with joy. My brother was amongst those below.
I stopped, my gaze searching the small crowd. I couldn’t see anyone with red hair, and it took me a while to realize why. Rhoan didn’t have red hair. Thanks to Liander’s magic, he was now boring brown.
With that in mind, he wasn’t hard to find. He was on the outskirts of the group, sitting on the ground, his clothes dusty and torn and a bloody cloth held to his head.
For the second time that night I reacted without thinking, and it took Rhoan looking up and minutely shaking his head to remember where I was and who we were supposed to be.
I slowed to walking speed and skirted the main group, pretending concern and offering words of encouragement to those being tended to before making my way toward him. His gaze met mine. His brown eyes might be alien, but his smile was all too familiar. So warm and welcoming. God, I was so happy to see him again, it was hard to restrain the urge to dance.
“Hey,” he said, so softly it was little more than a stirring of air. “Glad to see you got here safely.”
“And I’m glad to see you got out of that mess safely.” I wanted to touch him, hug him, but that was impossible, so I simply kneeled beside him, my knees touching his thighs as I raised his hand to see the wound. It was nothing too bad, just a nasty jagged cut he could have easily healed by shifting shape. “Why haven’t you fixed that?”
“Because my wolf is red, which is at odds with my new identity.”
Of course. Stupid me. “So why were you even in the kitchen?”
“It’s been a pretty rugged day, and none of us had much of a chance to eat.” He shrugged. “Moss had arranged a meal in the kitchen, but luckily, he got a call about a possible intruder and split us up into groups to check out the different areas. I was in the outside group.” 
“Lucky you.”
“Yeah.” He touched my knee and squeezed it lightly. That one action suggested he’d been a lot closer to the blast than he was leading me to believe. “What’s been happening with you? Besides pissing off Jack, that is.”
I grinned slightly. “He should know me well enough to realize there’s no way known I’d throw the baby out with the bathwater.”