“They could expose us to mortals,” Damien said.

“They could hunt us to neutralize the risk we present to them,” Malachai suggested.

“They could al y with the vampires,” Geoffrey threw in. “I wouldn’t put it past Syre.”

Adrian nodded, knowing Syre was hurting now, having lost his daughter forever when Lindsay had exorcised Shadoe’s reincarnated soul from her body. “That’s the most likely scenario of the three.”

The three Sentinels didn’t know what it was like to lose a piece of one’s heart—they hadn’t been compromised by human emotions as Adrian and Syre had been. Adrian didn’t doubt that the vampire leader wanted to strike out in his grief, and the lycan revolt would give Syre the perfect means to that end.

Lindsay’s eyes lost their brightness. She shook her head vehemently. “I can’t see that happening. Elijah lives to hunt vamps, and he wants Vashti’s head on a platter for what she did to Micah.”

“And Syre, Torque, and Vashti want his because of Nikki’s abduction,” Adrian said, “but vengeance can be postponed with the right incentive.”

He softened his voice, knowing she considered the lycan a friend. “You never thought he would revolt and he did.”

She bit her lower lip, her eyes reflecting her concern. Even now she worried about the Alpha.

Adrian brushed across her mind, a gentle caress to calm her, because he couldn’t bear to see her troubled. It wasn’t just Elijah’s fate making her anxious, but Syre’s, too. She wasn’t the vampire leader’s daughter by blood, but carrying Shadoe’s soul inside her had left a mark—she’d been exposed to Shadoe’s memories of Syre: fond, sweet recol ections of a daughter’s love for her father. While they weren’t her memories, Lindsay felt the emotion of them as if they had been, and she grieved their loss.

She shot him a warning look, reminding him of her demand that he not “mess” with her mind. His head tilted in acknowledgment, but he didn’t cease soothing her because he didn’t perceive that as messing with her. At least not to his way of thinking.

Lindsay caught his wrist and imagined sticking her tongue out at him, the thought entering his mind with vivid clarity. He felt a silent laugh move through him. She was so ful of vitality and humor despite the many blows life had dealt her. He was so different from her, having been created to punish and imprison, to maim and kil . But she was teaching him a different way, changing him in slow degrees, bringing her light into his darkness.

And he made a concerted effort to learn and grow, to be the sort of man who could bring a smile to her face and happiness to her life. Because she was his soul. Who was he if not the man who loved her beyond al reason and self-preservation?

The phone began to ring in his office. They al heard it despite the distance from where they stood and the glass patio door that closed off his workspace from the outdoors. Lindsay frowned and turned, stil growing accustomed to her vampiric senses.

Adrian moved away, rounding the corner. The glass panel slid aside as he approached and he wil ed his wings away. They dissipated like fog in a stiff wind when he stepped inside, affording him comfortable movement as wel as the ability to blend with mortals. The speakerphone was engaged by the third ring and his gaze held Lindsay’s as he settled into his chair.

“Mitchel ,” he greeted the cal er.

“Captain. Siobhán here.”

He leaned back in his chair, settling in. He’d tasked Siobhán with studying the disease ravaging the vampire ranks, and she had been working ceaselessly on that mission for weeks. It was she who’d inadvertently discovered that Sentinel blood cured the il ness when a Sentinel working with her was bitten by one of the infected, resulting in the infected returning to a normal vampiric state. Considering the tens of thousands of vampires in North America alone and the less than two hundred Sentinels left in existence, it was information they couldn’t afford to have the vampires discover before an alternate cure was found. “How are you progressing?”

“Slowly but surely. I’ve got a dozen infected in stasis now. We can keep them alive with steady blood transfusions, but they have to stay anesthetized or they’re impossible to control.”

Adrian had seen the monstrosities in action firsthand. He knew how mindlessly violent they were. “How quickly do they lose higher brain function?”

“How far do you want me to go to find out?” she asked grimly. “They’re already infected by the time I get them. If you want a play-by-play of what happens from exposure to il ness, I’l need to deliberately infect healthy subjects.”

“Do it. Our blood is a cure, so we can reverse the damage.” It was a brutal order and one he didn’t enjoy making, but the ends justified the means. When Nikki had attacked him and nearly taken his life, she’d stil been cognizant enough to speak to him coherently. How recently had she been exposed? Had she been an example of someone who’d been recently contaminated? Or someone who’d been il for a while? “Have you been able to spot any patterns in the rapidity of progression?”

Some vamps were dead within a few days, others lasted a few weeks, and stil others appeared to be immune. Why?

“I think I’m onto something in that regard.” Her excitement came through in her voice. The pixielike Sentinel was ravenous for knowledge. “I’m not entirely positive yet, but it seems as if the advancement varies depending on how far removed the minion is from the Fal en heading their vampiric hierarchy. For example, Lindsay is once removed from Syre. Her infection would advance much more slowly than a minion she Changed, who would be twice removed from Syre. And so on and so on.”

He set his elbows on the armrests and steepled his fingers together. “You need to test Fal en blood.”

“It would be helpful, yes,” she conceded, certainly knowing how difficult it would be to attain. “Then I could see if it at least slows the development of the disease.”

“I’m your best chance of getting it,” Lindsay interjected. “As a vampire myself, I’d fit right in to any location where they congregate.”

Adrian’s response was immediate. “No.”

Her brows lifted. Her amber eyes chal enged him—the distinctive irises of a vampire. One who could move among the others with ease, but who was stil frail in many ways. His Sentinel blood would protect her from the il ness, and she knew how to fight and wouldn’t hesitate to kil , but she’d stil be vulnerable and he wouldn’t be close enough to protect her. And there was the fact that while most minions would have no idea who she was, some of the Fal en did because of Syre and Shadoe. She wasn’t total y anonymous.

He couldn’t risk her, couldn’t lose her. “No,” he said again, pushing the negation into her mind for emphasis.

“Stay out of my head, angel,” she growled.

Siobhán’s melodious voice floated out of the phone’s speaker. “I’m also going to need more lycan blood.”

“Not a problem.” He had plenty cryogenical y stored, for identification and genetic testing purposes. “Anything else?”

“Perhaps…” She hesitated a moment. “Perhaps other angelic blood samples. From a mal’akh or even an archangel. Preferably both. Perhaps we Sentinels aren’t the only ones who carry the cure in our veins.”

“You don’t ask for much, do you?” Adrian said drily. Even though malakhim—the lowest rank of angel in the lowest sphere—were the most numerous, getting blood from one was no easy task. “I’l see what I can do. Keep me posted.”

“Yes, Captain. Of course.”

He hung up, his gaze never leaving Lindsay’s face. She was careful not to openly chal enge him in front of his subordinates, a circumspection she’d always displayed and he had always appreciated. But she’d chal enge him in private. He would never tel her how much it aroused him when she did so. He’d just continue to show her instead… “We need a plan B, Lindsay. Work on coming up with that.”

Elijah shoved both hands through his hair, his heart pounding violently, his gaze on the woman sprawled prone on the bed. Vashti’s hair was a crimson cloud around her, the glossy strands lying sinuously atop her back and shoulders. Her face was turned toward him, her lips parted with her panting exhalations. Her clawed hands fisted the fitted sheet, and trails of tears were stil visible on her pale cheeks. Not due to him, but to the nightmare she’d suffered that had woken him.

No…please…stop… Over and over in a broken litany. Whimpers and gasps of pain. Moans of agony that ripped through his vitals.

He would never forget the bloodcurdling scream that had sent him leaping from the bed as a man but landing on the floor in his lupine form.

Without his wil . His beast had bypassed his control for the first time ever. For her. Because she’d cried out in distress, struggling through the throes of a nightmare.

And he’d been unable to shift back until the beast was certain she was al right. He’d paced the room, sniffing along the cracks around the door and in the corners, growling because there was no other outlet for his helpless fury but to search and find nothing to kil . Once he’d been assured that nothing in the locked room posed a threat to her, he’d padded over to the bed. He had nuzzled against the crown of her head and licked away her tears. She’d calmed then, settling back into a fitful sleep. Only then had he been capable of shifting back.

Everyone was wrong about him—he was no Alpha or he would never have shifted without conscious thought. Which meant they needed to find one who was. Quickly.

In the meantime, he was crazily attuned to Vashti. To the extreme. Their primal mating had brought on more than explosive orgasms. It had altered him and his reactions to her, eroding his control along with his goddamn common sense. He could hardly recognize himself this morning.

What the fuck was the matter with him?

He was afraid he knew. Those endless moments when he’d been bound and captured beneath her, helpless to stop her as she took his blood and his semen into her mouth, riveted by the burn of fury and ferocious desire as she sheathed his aching cock in her tight, hot depths…they’d shifted him on the inside. And when he had taken over and she’d shattered beneath him, he had accepted the surrender of such a powerful and lethal woman with a possessive surge of awe and gratitude.

Someone’s fist pounded against the door, and Elijah yanked it open, scowling at the interruption of Vashti’s rest.

“What do you want?” he snapped at Salem, who sucked up al the space in the hal way. Elijah didn’t give a shit that he was bare-assed naked.

Neither did the vamp.

“Have you seen Vashti?” Salem barked back. Then his nose twitched as he scented the air. His eyes widened as he comprehended just how thoroughly Elijah had seen her.

“Yeah. Go away.”

“Where’d she go?”

“She’s sleeping. Come back later.” Elijah backed up and shut the door.

Salem stopped the latch from catching with a slap of his palm against the metal. “Sleeping?”

“You know. Eyes closed. Lack of consciousness. Sound familiar? Go away.”

Salem pushed to widen the opening. “Move aside, lycan.”

Bored with the conversation and stil aggravated by Vash’s nightmare, Elijah stepped out to the hal way and shut the door careful y behind him.

Then he shoved the vampire across the hal and into the opposite doorway, which Salem busted through to slide into the foot of a heavily occupied bed. Elijah got a glimpse of enough bare limbs and arched necks to make up at least four bodies.

Salem was up and in Elijah’s face in a split-second. “You’re pissing me off, dog. Vash doesn’t sleep.”

“She does when she’s tired.”

Amber eyes glowing, Salem’s voice lowered ominously. “What did you do to her?”

“Real y?” Elijah asked drily. “That’s none of your damn business.”

“If you hurt her—”

Elijah laughed at that, a sound with little humor in it. He’d been chained and assaulted, and the vamp was worried about Vash. “She can take of herself.”

Salem stared him down. Elijah yawned.

“She hasn’t slept in decades,” the vamp said final y.

“Wel , that might explain why she’s so bitchy.” Elijah’s voice changed, lowered. “But then bitchy is preferable to broken.”

The vamp’s jaw tightened.

“What happened to her, Salem?”

“Ask her yourself, lycan.” Salem’s mouth curved with mocking cruelty. “Until she tel s you that, you’ve got nothing but sex with her. You’re just a dick with stamina.”

Elijah was a second away from slamming his fist in the vamp’s taunting face when Salem turned and stepped back into the room he’d crashed into, lifting the warped door off the ground and popping it into the frame with himself inside.

It took Elijah a few minutes and several deep breaths to rein in his volatile mood enough to return to the room he shared with Vash. He pushed the door open slowly and just wide enough for him to slide in. What he saw inside froze him.

Vashti sat on the edge of the mattress, his shirt in her fisted hands and pressed to her nose. She jerked guiltily when he came in, as if she’d been caught doing something she shouldn’t. Her hands dropped into her lap, baring her gorgeous tits.

She stood in an agitated rush. “What time is it? We should get going.”

“It’s a little after seven.” He didn’t need a watch to tel him that. His circadian rhythm was instinctively set by the moon, wherever in the world he was, courtesy of the werewolf blood in his lineage. He approached her cautiously, as if nearing a skittish animal.