Taking Back Sunday Read online

  Nothing jumped out of the shadows with a neon sign blaring, Evil Witches, and likely, it wouldn’t. If Sunday were going to learn anything about what went on in Vicky and her grandmother’s house, then she would have to use the extrasensory gifts in her arsenal. All energy left a stain. It lived and breathed in the world, seeping from people’s pores and swarming in the air between them. Magic fragranced the air with its residue, and Sunday’s unique gift was her ability to sense and manipulate it. She couldn’t remember a time when she didn’t know how to do this, and given a lifetime of practice, she had developed quite the skill. Whatever weaknesses she had, she’d learned to discover and manage, and her strengths had blossomed in the process.

  Softly, Sunday flattened her palms on the cool kitchen window and took a slow, deep breath to relax. She closed her eyes and created a blank canvas in her mind. Sweat beaded on her forehead as her grip around her psychic shields loosed. Instantly, millions of thoughts, feelings, and expressions pummeled her consciousness. The initial onslaught always seemed the worst part of the ordeal. Suddenly opening herself up to the energy around her meant it all barreled in at once. Like a boulder dropped into a fast-running river, the waters crashed over her, and if she didn’t catch her breath quickly, she’d drown.

  Jaw clenched and squeezing her eyes tightly, she braced herself and breathed. In. Out. In. Out.

  Battening down the hatches wouldn’t work. If Sunday wanted to gather information, accessing the psychic memory of the space was essential. She had to open herself up and let the energy flow through her. Like the pro that she had once been, Sunday needed to be the conduit and the conductor. She visualized the stream breaking around her. The rapid current tore past her too quickly for her to make sense of what she was seeing. She needed to pull herself together if she wanted to take a reading of the house.

  Her fingers cramped, and Sunday pressed her hand against the glass again, firm in her resolve.

  “Show me,” she whispered. “I’m looking for a threat. Show me the history of this place.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  The bartender held the photograph in his hand, carefully scanning it for details that could spark some recollection. After a minute, he laid it on the bar and pushed it back to the barrel-chested man who had handed it to him in the first place. Crow’s-feet crinkled the corner of Cyrus’ eyes as he glared at the bartender.

  “She’s hot, and I’d like to think I’d remember a good looking girl like that. Truth is, man, she can be any one of these chicks.” He fanned over the space around them.

  A muscle in Cyrus’ jaw popped, and he slammed his hand onto the countertop and pushed the picture back to the bartender.

  “She’s changed a bit. Check again,” he challenged.

  The bartender’s fingers trembled as they flitted with the edge of the photograph. After another long look, he shook his head.

  “Sorry. I wish I could help you, but I can’t. What makes you think this chick would be here anyway? Where’d you say she was from?”

  “I didn’t.” Cyrus rubbed his beard and breathed out a hard sigh.

  “She your girl?”

  “Nope. She’s no one’s girl.”

  He snatched the photograph back, sneaking a quick glance at it before shoving it into his chest pocket. He scanned the bottles on the shelf behind the bartender.

  “Get me a whiskey. Make it a double.” Through the mirror behind them, he saw Angel chatting it up with a pair of lounge flies. He jutted his chin at the mirror. “And whatever the Hell those girls are having, get them a round.”

  In the last few years, Cyrus had visited more cities than he had in his whole life prior. Each time, a lead took him somewhere, and then a new one led him somewhere else. The search for the Incarnate had gone on far too long, and it was wearing thin. Intermittently, he came across some new intel, but just as soon as he’d follow the lead, the trail would go cold. This latest photograph was a recent acquisition. Outside of the photographs he’d been collecting, Cyrus hadn’t laid eyes on the target for almost ten years.

  Cyrus had hardly finished his drink when Angel strode up behind him and shoved a brunette into his face. With his arm around her friend, Angel winked and told him that their dates didn’t intend on spending the night at the bar. All his thinking of the Incarnate had given rise to a dangerous need. An angry erection tugged at his jeans, and it was all he could do to stop from ripping Angel’s offering apart right there at the bar.

  The girl ran her hand up his thigh, looking up at him through heavy lashes. Her hand found his bulge, and she licked the lips of her cat-like grin. She leaned into him, her breasts spilling from her cleavage, and placed her lips to his ear.

  “You hungry?” she purred.

  The brunette’s name was Peaches. It was a fucking joke, but Cyrus didn’t care.

  In her friend’s apartment hours later, she laid her head on his sweaty chest and fingered the hair over his heart. An hour of pounding into Peaches’ soft, velvet flesh had done nothing to soothe him. A ball gathered in his chest wound so tight he could burst.

  He reached for the photograph in his jacket and stared at it over the mess of damp tresses on his chest. The Incarnate just over a year ago was nothing like the girl he’d left behind at the compound.

  When Bernadette put out the first contract on the Incarnate over a decade earlier, every preternatural sect jumped at the proposition. The Alaska pack won out because of Cyrus. He was a storied tracker, and his involvement secured the deal. At the time, Bernadette was the most powerful witch in the country. Later, with the Incarnate at her behest, Bernadette rose as a dictator over the preternatural realm.

  Although the witch had never explained why she didn’t acquire possession herself, she put the fear of God in the wolves. They kept reminding each other that they were just scooping up, transporting, and dropping off a kid, but doubts lingered and they’d been ready for any fallout. The Incarnate’s power hadn’t been checked. Bernadette assured them that the clock was ticking to some end that they wouldn’t be looking forward to.

  What the werewolf captors encountered in Louisiana was a deceptively average fourteen-year-old girl. The Incarnate rolled her eyes sarcastically and smacked her tongue liberally. When she smiled, her eyes sparkled with naiveté. No battery of unassailable fires of mystical energy battered them when they approached her. No terror-stricken banshee wails pierced their eardrums when she spoke. The greatest danger she seemed to pose came from her off-key singing in the backseat as she rode with them during her abduction.

  It was in Albuquerque when Cyrus first laid eyes on the target of their mission. He’d waited at the first spot along the delivery route for Angel and Stephen to bring her to him. Nothing prepared him for what he saw or felt when she arrived. The reaction had been instantaneous. She was a magnet for all the negativity in Cyrus’ world. All the hate. All the anger. All the spite. All the fury. It pointed at her. That girl. That child. Blackness closed in around them. Inspired to kill her, Cyrus fumed at the instant he first saw her. Meanwhile, she sat unbothered, smacking her bubblegum. Totally ignorant of him. It did nothing but fuel his rage.

  But he couldn’t just leave her. The fire that she ignited consumed him. Dizzy with the cataclysm she inspired in him, Cyrus sought Bernadette’s counsel. During that conversation, the witch made him an offer, stay on as the head of her security team, and she would help him manage the effects the girl had on him. So he did. For three years, Cyrus oversaw the daily on-site operations at the estate. Always working in the shadows, Cyrus and the guards were veritable ghosts on the property. Months would go by, and he wouldn’t even see the girl. They would travel with an entourage that he trained while he stayed behind to man the fortress.

  For those years and through all that separation, the firestorm in him never abated for even a moment. If anything, knowing she was so close made it impossible for him to function. She was toxic, and the poison’s effects were unassailable. He was in perpetual torture. When it be
came clear that Bernadette could do nothing to alleviate what ailed him, he resigned his charge and left the witch and her preternatural plaything.

  Whatever she was, whatever her purpose, and whatever chaos she was bound to unleash was out of his hands. He returned to his pack in Alaska and reclaimed his position as their lead tracker. When the Pastophori of Iset set a bounty on her head for recapture, the pack Alpha didn’t hesitate to take the lucrative job, nor did Cyrus hesitate to jump at the chance to recapture her. Stephen, his pack Alpha, put the deal in place and gave Cyrus the green light to confront her again. That was over two years ago.

  Peaches stirred on his chest and snatched the picture from Cyrus’ hand. Her pert, pink tips stood at attention, and the firm mounds hardly moved as she lay back beside him.

  “Who’s this?” she asked. “This your girl?”

  “Nope,” he answered, grabbing the photograph and tossing it aside on the carpet by where they lay. From the other room, he heard Angel and Peaches’ friend starting up again. They were at the friend’s apartment, and Angel and she had taken the bedroom while Cyrus and his date had taken residence on the living room floor.

  “So, who’s the girl?” she asked again. This time turning back to him, and taking a cue from the couple behind closed doors, Peaches took his semi-hard cock in her hand and stroked, first softly, then harder.

  Cyrus laid his head back, closing his eyes. His mind wandered back to the picture of Sunday as a grown woman. He imagined opening her up like a cabinet of curiosities. His erection grew full in Peaches’ hand as his wolf rose to the surface. Rather than ignore it, he let Peaches stroke him through it, as the photograph of Sunday in her sundress built in his mind. Tattooed flowers draped over her shoulder and cascaded down her arm. He hadn’t seen them yet, but he’d learned that gladiolas covered her leg. Always, in his memories, like in the photograph, her gaze hovered just beyond him. Cyrus found himself wondering, not for the first time, what it would be like to look straight into the honey saucers of her eyes.

  Peaches leaned into his ear and whispered, “Tell me about her.”

  “She’s a woman I used to know.” The timbre of his voice rumbled through his chest.

  “Why do you carry around a picture of her?” Peaches purred.

  Cyrus hesitated as he delved into the cavern of his memory to a place deep inside where the Incarnate lived. He gritted his teeth as he pictured her, at fourteen, covered in bruises and dried blood as he carried her from Bernadette’s torture chamber. For years, he could believe that what his pack had done had been just, but that faith was misplaced. The Incarnate was a monster, but delivering a child into weeks of torture was a fucking atrocity.

  A confluence of self-hatred and hate for the Incarnate brewed in him.

  “I ran into her a while ago while I was on a job,” Cyrus answered. “At first, I didn’t recognize her. She had to have been in her early twenties, and I hadn’t seen her since she was a kid.”

  He gasped as Peaches found her rhythm, keeping pace with the feelings evoked by the vision of Sunday.

  “She was older. But it was the same face. And she was… fucking beautiful.” His breath caught in his throat again, and he growled. Opening his eyes and looking into Peaches’, his erection softened, and she forced his head back.

  “Keep telling me, babe,” she said. “I like what it’s doing to you.”

  When Peaches combed through his hair, Cyrus imagined Sunday’s caress. His cock jerked in response.

  “I’m gonna need you real stiff to ride your big cock again.”

  If it took another woman to get Cyrus hard, then Peaches would let it happen.

  “I was in Austin at a festival.” He was verbalizing in fragments. “I was talking to someone else. I don’t know how I saw her. She wasn’t standing out. I just knew. I felt her.”

  As a familiar hurricane brewed in his belly, Cyrus’ attention drifted from the werewolf he was talking to, to the tall brunette. Of everything that he could have noticed, that woman yards away drew him like a magnet. Instantly, his skin pricked and his senses tuned only to her. As he watched her, whatever the werewolf was telling Cyrus turned into white noise. The woman’s hand reached toward her face, and she brushed a long, errant tress behind her ear, revealing her face. The recognition of whom she was almost knocked him over. The gut-wrenching desire to tear her apart rose with a conflicting desperation for her touch.

  “I didn’t even know it was her. I couldn’t have known. She was lost for so long. The last I heard, she had taken off, and no one had seen her for years. But there she was.”

  Peaches leaned closer into Cyrus’ ear. She kissed his lobe and dug her tongue into his ear.

  “You wanted her.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you get her?”

  “No.”

  “You got me,” she purred, sucking his lobe again.

  Cyrus’ eyes shot open. He grabbed Peaches by her bony hips and pulled her onto his lap, buckling her knees at his sides. He brought his mouth to her breasts and tore at her hard nubs with his teeth. Peaches brought her hands to his head and yanked it back to smash her mouth onto his. While Cyrus feasted on Peaches’ mouth with carnal abandon, she lifted her hips and teased the tip of his cock with her moist entrance.

  “I’m gonna fuck that girl right out of you,” she said, her words demanding, her stare burning into him.

  His eyes were the color of flames, anger burning away the image of Sunday looking over her shoulder, scanning the crowd at the festival, looking just ahead of him at the stand that was blocking her line of sight. She’d smiled then, pleased with whatever she had seen or whatever she hadn’t seen. Smiled.

  Aware of who she was, Cyrus revved himself up with hate. The once-dormant tumult of passion and ire erupted in him once more. She should have known better. Given her abnormal sensitivity to the world around her, the Incarnate should have been able to catch a whiff of what was welling inside of him. She should have run for her life. But she didn’t. As she had through all the years they’d spent together, she didn’t even know he was there.

  Before he could linger on that encounter any longer, Peaches lowered herself onto his erection. Cyrus’ muscles tensed and rippled down his body. She pulled his face to hers and left an inch of space between them.

  “I’m gonna fuck her right out of you,” she swore.

  There was no question as to what was happening. These were two people entering into some violent, carnal fucking. There would be no love, no softness, and no care. These were needs that had to be met. Hunger that ravaged. A man who could kill the woman that inspired such conflict within him, and a woman who ached to be wanted, wanted to be desired.

  “Please,” he responded. No pleading in his tone. It was a command, a challenge. “Do it,” he said. “Get rid of her.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Angel threw his hands up and slammed them back down on the dash. Cyrus had just returned from interviewing a woman that recognized Sunday from a photograph. The werewolves shared a hard, long stare. A tip they collected during their last stop, Reno, had led them to Chicago. On this, their second night in the Windy City, they finally found a witness that confirmed Sunday had been there, but the information wasn’t current, and there were no clues to where she’d gone to next.

  “I can’t believe she’s this good!” Angel’s rough voice cracked in exasperation. “When she was a kid, she let us kidnap her. Now, she’s practically a ghost. Did she get some covert ops training after she annihilated the witch-bitch? For two years, we’ve been at this shit, and we’re still nowhere close to grabbing her.”

  His obsidian eyes shone with the street lamp overhead that flooded into the car. The parking lot was dark but for that light and the neon sign at the door of the club. Club goers were already starting to head out for the night. It was nearing last call. The two werewolves sat in the truck, reviewing Cyrus’ findings from his interviews inside. One girl had recognized Sunday in the most recent photog
raph he carried of her. Even as he carried it in his shirt pocket, it burned against his chest.

  “She’s good, but she’s not perfect,” Cyrus said.

  He pulled out his phone and displayed the latest image of the Incarnate. Mostly, the trails turned up cold, but sometimes, like this time, they paid off with some bit of new information. The girl who had recognized Sunday’s photo at the club emailed him some pictures from a year and a half earlier. So far, it was the closest they’d come to locating her. For all intents and purposes, the Incarnate had fallen off the radar in the last year. Her pit stops along the road had, until then, been consistent. Every couple of months, she popped up in a different location. That is, until she stopped showing up altogether. The hunters had been turned around a couple of times since then. It was starting to feel like they were never going to catch up to her.

  “She makes mistakes,” Angel said as he yanked the phone from Cyrus’ hand. “Thank Christ, she makes mistakes.”

  He inspected the pictures, scrolling through them and looking for any clues.

  “Take a look at this one,” he said, turning the phone back to Cyrus. “We get leg in this one. That’s the tattoo the dick in Reno inked.” He nodded sharply to Cyrus. “It’s good work from the looks of it. Too bad that guy’s a waste of fucking air.”

  Cyrus turned away from the phone and leered out the window. Images of Sunday straddling the tattoo artist on some dirty motel sheets flashed through his mind. His fingernails dug into the palms of his hands, and his face grew red. Over a decade earlier, the Incarnate lit a spark in him, and the fire still raged. Picturing her with other men caused a cataclysm in his chest. He didn’t know whether he wanted to kill her, or kill the man with her. Either outcome would have been sufficient in putting him out of his misery. The Incarnate shouldn’t be walking around and doing whatever she liked or whomever she liked. She should be locked up, encased in a glass box, and stored away where she couldn’t cause any more damage.