“How much farther do we have to go?” he rumbled in that sexy drawl that made her pulse quicken each and every time he spoke. Saige shivered in reaction, somehow feeling that evocative sound in the center of her body, penetrating and warm, as if she’d swallowed a hot, smoldering ball of fire.
“Just a few more blocks,” she said, wishing the skies would unleash a frigid rain to cool the simmering heat beneath her skin. She was uncomfortably aware of the Merrick’s agitation growing worse with each moment that she spent with him. It prowled within her body like a panther pacing its cage, taking a primal, feral interest in the man walking at her side. Struggling to remain calm, she crossed her arms over her chest and drew in a deep breath that filled her senses with the pulse of the ethnic neighborhood, and more important, with that hot, mouthwatering scent she’d already come to recognize as pure, intoxicating Quinn.
“Have you ever been to South America before, Mr. Quinn?” she asked, surprised by the huskiness of her voice.
“Just Quinn.” The brackets etched around his mouth deepened as he added, “This is my first time down here.”
“I thought so,” she murmured, a small grin playing softly at the corner of her lips. The roughened surface of the road crunched beneath their booted feet, but Saige hardly noticed the grating sound, too fascinated by the hard play of muscle beneath his burnished skin as he lifted one hand, pushing it through the dark scrub of his hair. The cut would have looked severe on any other man, but it simply emphasized Quinn’s outrageously good looks. Despite his “in your face” male ruggedness, his features were impossibly perfect, like something that’d been sculpted from marble, his sharp cheekbones only accentuating the strong, masculine angles.
Clearing her throat, she went on to say, “You look as if you don’t quite know what to make of this place.”
Seemingly oblivious to the fact that she was practically drooling over him, the tension around his mouth eased a little as he slanted her a lopsided smile. “Is it that obvious?” he asked, his smile widening as he rubbed his left hand over the tanned length of his right forearm. “I was hoping the tan might help me blend in.”
A shaky laugh vibrated in her throat, and she inwardly rolled her eyes at herself, unable to believe that she, Saige Buchanan, the most independent woman she knew, had gone gaga over a breathtakingly gorgeous stranger like some teeny-bopping airhead. “You just seem preoccupied with the neighborhood,” she replied, forcing her attention back to the shadowed street. On either side of the narrow road, windows flickered with the soft glow of light, reminding her of blinking, watchful eyes, and she tightened the flannel shirt around her waist, then hefted her backpack higher onto her right shoulder, seeking comfort in the mundane tasks. “I guess all this probably takes some getting used to,” she added, stepping around a frenzied group of chickens that were pecking at some scraps outside an open doorway. “Especially if you’re accustomed to the wide-open spaces of the mountains.”
“I guess so,” he drawled with a deep, decadent rumble of laughter that sounded so purely male, her temperature spiked higher. It was an almost dizzying sensation, that wild, steady rise of her Merrick within her body, the primal creature shifting sinuously beneath her skin as it raised its head and sniffed delicately at the air. She choked back a low, sensual purr, the carnal sound vibrating softly on her tongue, and could have sworn that she could taste the rich, sumptuous flavor of her need. The Merrick was hungry with bloodlust, its craving for nourishment more intense than it’d ever been before, and Saige suspected she knew why.
It was Quinn. Her growing fascination with the dark, mysterious Watchman had easily bled past the woman and into the powerful creature living within her. Even though her awakening of that ancient blood had only just begun, she could feel the building heat in her gums, the fiery burn in her veins…and knew it was coming closer. Mounting. Growing stronger. She was driven by a primal instinct to touch…and taste…and possess—the visceral, sexual urges so potent, she felt almost drunk on their power.
Desperately in need of a distraction, she searched her mind for a topic that was guaranteed to get her mind off sex and back on track. “So we, um…obviously know that the Casus are after me, but what about the Collective?”
Saige watched his expression harden, and could tell from his tone that he held no more love for the ruthless organization than she did. “What about them?”
“Are they already hunting us? Me and my brothers?”
“We’ve had some scouts show up in Henning, where your brothers live…or lived,” he explained. “Ian is at the compound now, and we’re still trying to convince Riley to move up, as well. We’re worried about him being down in town on his own, but so far the scouts haven’t done anything more than sniff around.”
“That seems odd,” she murmured. “Do you think they know Ian is at Ravenswing?”
He lifted one rugged, beautiful hand, and rubbed at the back of his neck, his powerful bicep straining the sleeve of his T-shirt. “If they do, I’m sure we’ll know soon enough, seeing as how Collective soldiers aren’t ones to employ patience. But for the time being, our biggest problems are the Casus and the Consortium.”
Saige sent him a startled look of surprise. “But I thought you were a part of the Consortium.”
“You know about the council?” he asked, his own surprise evident in the softly spoken words. Turning right at the next corner, they continued deeper into the aged neighborhood, the winding road taking a slight incline up the mountainside, back toward the jungle, while the succulent scents of home-cooked meals thickened on the air.
“From what I understand,” she told him, “the Consortium governs all the ancient clans, like some kind of preternatural United Nations.”
And as far as Saige knew, it was the Consortium who had helped the Merrick imprison the Casus over a thousand years ago, after the Casus’s relentless killing of humans threatened to expose the existence of the nonhuman races. The council had fashioned the Dark Markers to destroy the immortal killers, only to be murdered by the newly created Collective Army before they could complete the task. Years later, the Consortium had finally been formed again, but by then its original archives had been lost…all traces of the Markers supposedly destroyed during the Collective’s bloodthirsty raids, which nearly led to the destruction of the clans. By the time the Consortium was back in power, no one knew where the Markers were, or how to find them…or even if they had ever truly existed. The new Consortium had supposedly been searching for the original archives for centuries, as had the Collective, hoping the lost records would lead to some answers, but as far as Saige knew, neither group had ever found them.
“You actually report to the Consortium, don’t you?” she asked, wondering if Quinn was even aware of the maps’ existence.
“Yeah,” he rasped, slanting her an odd look.
“What?”
Quinn rolled his broad shoulders with only a fraction of movement, finally shoving his restless hands into his pockets. “I guess I’m just surprised that with as much as you know about everything—which seems to be a hell of a lot—you never tried to warn your brothers about what you’d learned. It would have been nice if they’d known what was coming.”
Instead of getting defensive, Saige responded with a small, bitter smile. “Who says I didn’t?”
She could read the questions in his dark eyes as he cut her a slow, interested look.
Wrapping her hands around the frayed strap of her backpack, she explained. “The last time I saw Riley, I tried to warn him…to tell him that I feared I’d found the cross in Italy for a reason. That I was afraid it could be a sign, one that meant the legendary awakenings the gypsies had foretold were actually coming. And do you know what he told me?” she asked, barging ahead without waiting for a response. “He said we’d be monsters if the things I believed ever turned out to be true, same as the Casus,