Messy stuff. Then again, families usually were. She knew that all too well.
On paper, Aidan Murphy looked like a saint, rehabbing addicts and forming a little commune out in the wilderness—not so different from what her hippie parents had done back in Texas. Those would be the tie-dye-wearing parents who thought it would be funny to name their two eagle-shifter kids Robin and Wren.
In the flesh, though, Aidan Murphy had been inscrutable. Frosty-eyed and silent, that one. Kind of the way she’d expected all the fangaroos to be. She’d been pleasantly surprised to find Mirren lived up to his grizzly-bear rep. But Robin had the distinct impression, from the way those intense blue eyes followed her movements, that not much escaped Aidan Murphy’s notice. He might be a saint, or he might be dangerous. She’d withhold judgment. The colonel liked him, and she liked the colonel. For now, that was enough.
Which brought her back to the only other vamp she’d met so far. Cage Reynolds was intriguing; his dossier had hinted at broad military experience but mostly off-the-grid stuff, which probably meant he’d been fangs for hire. His human military service, back in World War II, was sealed so tightly within the archives of the British Army, even the colonel’s connections hadn’t been able to get at it. What kind of guy had sealed records seven decades after his supposed death?
He was magnetic, for sure. Hell, all the vamps she’d seen so far were fuckworthy, even the grizzly. Their physical beauty probably helped them lure unsuspecting humans into offering up veins. Would her blood taste different from that of a non-shifter? She’d like to experience feeding a vampire at least once. Of course, she might feel differently after she’d actually seen the fangs; so far, they’d all proven skilled at hiding them.
Still, Cage managed to come across as calm and competent without being arrogant. Maybe his training as a psy-fucking-chiatrist helped. He probably overanalyzed everything. He’d stood back and smiled as she sparred with Mirren, and he definitely gave off a sexual vibe when she talked to him. She could tell when a guy wanted her, and he wanted her whether he knew it yet or not. Cage was cool like Aidan; she couldn’t imagine him getting over-the-top excited about anything. Yet his face revealed more emotion than that of his boss, or scathe master, or whatever the vamps called their alpha.
Yep, Cage Reynolds had a certain je ne sais quoi, as her latte-drinking friends back in New Orleans would say.
Make that former friends. Or, rather, current friends living in her former city. She’d been injured during her first and only Omega Force mission when a psychotic wolf-shifter threw her out a third-floor window down in Galveston, Texas. The off-kilter fall had broken her wing.
Which meant she’d been forced to seek out her family’s healer.
Which meant he’d ratted her out to her family and they’d managed to discover where she lived.
Which meant she had to literally fly the coop again.
When the colonel asked who’d be willing to transfer to the Penton team, she’d volunteered in a wingbeat—even if it meant working with blood-sucking freaks.
Still, Cage Reynolds was an intriguing freak.
In the front seat, he and Nik had been doing that odd, circular bonding dance that straight men did. Guys never said what they thought—human guys, shifter guys, and, apparently, fanged guys. They’d never say, Hey, you’re cool. I like you. Let’s hang out. Or Hey, you suck ditch-water. Get out of my face or I’ll rip your balls off.
No, they’d do exactly as Nik and Cage were doing, making small talk to see what they could read into the other’s answers. Jumping to conclusions. Never saying what they meant.
“How’d you end up in Penton?” Nik asked, which Robin translated as “Where are your loyalties and what are you looking for?”
“It started as a way to scout out Aidan’s idea of a human-vampire community, to see if we could replicate it in the UK,” Cage said, establishing himself as a team player. Then he parried back a question to Nik: “Why would you volunteer to get mixed up in this project?”
Nik hesitated at this one, and Robin knew he was grappling with how honest he should be. His answer would set the tone for this friendship—and whether he’d admit it or not, Nik needed friends who wouldn’t judge him or try to use his gift. Robin’s gut told her Cage could be one of those kinds of friends, so it was her duty to nudge Nik along.
“He can’t read stuff off us,” she said, catching Nik’s frown in the rearview mirror as she sat up and leaned between the front seats. “If he touches a person, he—”
“Robin, zip it,” Nik snapped. “You have the brain-to-mouth filter of a parrot.”