Swallowing hard, she broke eye contact with the stranger, ducked her head, and hurried for the exit. Being inconspicuous suddenly seemed less important than escape while she still had the awareness to recognize that she was rapidly losing herself.
Whereas she'd garnered attention elsewhere, she attracted none at all at the door. Whoever had been assigned to staff the entrance was nowhere to be seen. She didn't envy the person responsible for the door if somebody slipped inside undetected.
Outside, the night was cold. She sank into a bank of shadows and hugged herself, trying to figure out where to go from here. Tall buildings the length of city blocks had once housed factory machinery. Now, the great walls of narrow windows were dark, empty eyes punctuating brick faces that together formed a sinister maze.
Getting off the highway, through the retired industrial district and to the Jungle's parking lot only took two or three minutes by car but the prospect of navigating the cracked sidewalks on bare feet, with something dark growing inside her, paralyzed Lily. She squeezed her eyes shut but that was a mistake because she could hear things. Scuttling, creeping things that spun her back into the bathroom of her store. Alexa's phone hit the ground and Lily's fingers curved claw-like, frantically scratching the exposed skin of her arms and chest.
The foreign sensation climbed her neck, her face. It spread over her scalp. She fell to the uneven sidewalk with a cry and gouged at her flesh until her palms were sticky, but still she itched.
Through the roar of blood in her ears, she thought she heard someone shout. An answering cry rose in her throat. She narrowly swallowed it, biting her tongue to smother her weakness. Whoever belonged to the voice would come for her and take her back to Jude. Every prick of spiders' sticky feet along her skin reminded her that she'd become a Trojan horse for more of the things and there'd be no way to contain them in an environment like the Jungle.
No, there would be one way. The violent plume of fire arcing above her shop filled her vision, sickening her.
Clinging to the certainty that she couldn't allow her poison to pollute the Jungle, she forced her hands still and slowly, slowly crept away from the club, into the jaws of one of the many dark arteries spiking away from the shifter heart.
* * *
"I don't like new things," Cavin said as the elevator doors slid closed, sealing the three Kings inside. "If I'd wanted to discover new species, would I have sunk my money into all of this?"
"We all have limits to what we can control." Ares braced his feet wide as the car jolted and started to climb.
"I don't," Cavin clipped.
Linking his hands behind his neck, Jude contemplated the seam between the closed doors. No, Cavin didn't have limits to his control. It was how he maintained such an iron grip on the Jungle. Where other shifters were volatile, the Kings were steady and cool. Constant. Other shifters, aggressive males as well as subversive females, had tried to provoke each of them at one time or another.
He thought of Lily and her bid for control over him. The challenge in her eyes as she dared him to acknowledge the power he couldn't take, that only she could give. That. That right there was what would make her his queen, a woman who could lead if necessary, a woman who could and would defend what was hers. She knew the fire of her inner heart. It wasn't the fire she'd tried to prove to him; no, she'd wanted him to know that she meant to keep it, that she wouldn't roll over and surrender all of herself even if she did surrender in his arms, in his bed.
By the time the elevator swayed to a stop and the doors parted, he burned for her again, his queen, a fierce woman who could become a warrior at his hands. And she was needed-he had no doubt of that. It had been centuries since shifters engaged in large-scale war. In North America, white settlers had won the bid for territory and now shifters held what they had. They'd abandoned the age of expansion decades past, given over to urban sprawl and extensive pipeline networks.
Hold what you have. That was the code they lived by now. Hold what you have, build it up to last, protect and defend it with your life.
Ares and Cavin strode out into the corridor, but Jude didn't move. He shot out his hand to hold the door and looked out into the dark hall. Low-watt lights studded the ceiling, their amber and emerald lenses casting mottled light, yet another aspect of the atmosphere Cavin had crafted. Even here in a utility channel of the building where only staff passed, the Kings had worked to recreate the lost wildness of their kind. But these were all special effects. The real lure pulsed in the energy brought by living creatures. Energy that was everything primitive-sexual, animal, untamed, with a thread of darkness …