I leaned down and caressed Caleb's cheek, studying that beautiful face, those haunted brown eyes. "That bastard angel might have broken you, but we're going to fix you. I want you back, Caleb; I want to see you smile, to see you laugh."
"I don't deserve it."
"You've paid your debt." I leaned down and placed a kiss to his forehead. "In full and then some."
"I'm."
"And stop saying you're sorry." I ruffled his hair. "I love you. Xander loves you. Lay here and rest up, okay?"
He opened his mouth as if he was about to say something, but then closed it again. The door opened, and I felt Lucien's presence before I even turned around.
"Is he okay, lover?"
I nodded and turned to face Lucien, as well as Nikolas, Sabaan, and Daniel. They all looked somewhere mixed between worried and relieved. But beneath that, there was something else. Fear? Disappointment?
"He wasn't caught, was he?" I asked.
Nikolas cleared his throat. "There are several trails and the team has split up to better the chances of capturing him."
The door opened behind Nikolas and Silver pushed his way into the room. He looked as if he'd run his ass off, and if he'd have been human, he'd still have been out of breath. Lucien turned, clearly aggravated.
"What is it, Silver?"
"We've got a huge problem," Silver said cautiously. "One of the teams traced the shooter as far as they could, but came across something else. The property that Sabaan used to own is& Well, it's&"
"It's what?" Sabaan asked.
"It's full of vampires and Lycan alike; not rogues, but a coven, with a Master and everything."
"I see," Lucien said after a long moment of silence. He turned to face the rest of us. "I did not want to announce that we had a rogue wolf, for fear of leaving us open for an attack or a turf war, but it seems we've managed to get both anyway."
"How could you not have known that another Master was in your territory?" Daniel asked. Nikolas and I exchanged looks and Daniel caught it. "What are you all hiding?"
"Maybe we should let Daniel know about your."
Lucien cut Nikolas off mid-sentence. "Silver, Cecil? Leave us, please." Cecil and Silver both seemed reluctant to leave the room, but once they did, Lucien sighed and shook his head. "There's something wrong with me, Daniel, but I don't know how it happened or why."
"Something? What kind of something?"
"Well, for one thing, he doesn't sleep during the day. For another? I caught him eating potato salad by the spoonful. It's like he's on the serum again," I said. "But he hasn't taken a single drop."
"Being on the serum would explain a dampening in his powers."
"But not all of them," Sabaan said. "His bond with me gave him a little power uppage, and it's remained intact."
"Have you seen Cecil about this?"
"No," Lucien said. "If I'm going to be poked and prodded, I would prefer Marcus be the one to do it."
"Very well," Daniel said after a moment. "I'll call him and get him here as soon as possible. In the meantime, no one is to step foot outside this mansion, do you hear me?" When we nodded, he looked at me. "Peter, I will have Doc bring one of my binders and you can choose your own security detail from within the pages. Once you find the men . or women . you want to interview, then we'll go from there."
Epilogue
In the past few days, it had become crystal clear that there was no way I was going to get away from having a security detail, now or in the future. It was a fact I was going to have to get used to, one way or another. I'd fought it for so long, thinking that I could just be another member of the coven, or just a "normal" vampire going out to feed at the clubs.
Oh, how wrong I'd been.
Not only was I in danger, those around me were, too. Caleb had put himself between me and a silver bullet, and no matter how much he thought it was a small thing, I owed him. That one act had gone a long way to convincing even Nikolas that maybe, just maybe, Caleb was an okay guy.
The shock alone from that admission had me speechless and staring at him off and on for well over an hour. He finally threatened to take it back unless I stopped.
I stopped, all right. But it was something I wanted to write down where I could pull it out as evidence down the road, just in case he mysteriously forgot that he'd ever uttered those words.
Lucien was a mess and it was all Sabaan, Nikolas, and I could do to keep him inside the mansion. He wanted to confront the new Master in town and call him out in a challenge. But with the current state of his body and his powers, the chances of him coming out of it alive were pretty slim.