Niamh had made her decision. In that moment, when Kiyo once again refused to divulge anything personal about himself, anything that would prove that he trusted her at least a little, she’d made up her mind to leave him behind.
It had been shockingly easy to slip out of the hotel undetected. Kiyo was exhausted from the last few days of constant activity and stress. She’d heard his soft snoring behind the door of his hotel room and known he was out for the count. Which was good because she didn’t really want to break his neck again to get away from him.
The latest vision hadn’t been about the fae or Tokyo.
She’d lied.
To her disbelief, the vision had been about an O’Connor witch.
The O’Connors were the Dublin coven Rose was born into, but after her parents died, the coven decided Rose’s existence was too dangerous. To stop the chance of her ever opening the gate, they planned to kill her. However, her aunt and uncle stole her away to the States and changed their identities so they couldn’t be found. When Rose was finally awakened to what she really was, the O’Connors learned of her whereabouts and went after her.
Unfortunately, Niamh and Ronan were there when she did.
Niamh’s pulse raced as her mind took her back to the memories she’d tried so hard to bury.
The coven had killed her brother.
Stolen Ronan’s life force to power themselves against her and Rose. It was a pointless, mindless death because his life energy was not enough. While she’d tried desperately to save him, Rose and Fionn had decimated the coven.
All but one.
At the beginning of the fight, Niamh had fought a witch and used her magic to throw her out the window of the apartment they were in.
According to this latest vision, that witch, Meghan O’Connor, was alive and hiding out in Paris.
The only thing that had kept Niamh from losing her mind when Ronan died was the knowledge that the coven had paid for what they’d done.
But they hadn’t.
One of their attackers still lived.
And vengeance like nothing Niamh had ever felt or ever believed herself capable of pumped black in her blood.
There had been a tiny part of her that had hoped Kiyo would trust her and in turn, she could trust him with the truth, that maybe he’d come with her while she dealt with the O’Connor witch.
Yet he was closed up tighter than a clamshell. Any illusions of feeling she felt between them were just that—the imaginings of a silly woman with a crush.
No, Niamh would deal with this alone. As she would deal with everything. The vision of the four stones, the four fae … the one who was supposed to be dead but wasn’t. Niamh would deal with it all because it was her job. Kiyo was just a well-paid guard. Nothing more. She couldn’t entrust him with the important knowledge she had.
Using the shadows to cloak herself as she moved through the tight, narrow, dark streets of Kalmar town, Niamh was a blur. Her first stop was an ATM. She pressed a hand to the machine and forced it to open its mouth and spew out cash. She slipped the money into her bag and then used her fae speed to arrive at the bus terminal. It took her about thirty seconds, what was otherwise a four-minute walk for a human.
While Kiyo had fallen asleep quickly, Niamh had gone downstairs to chat with the desk clerk about the bus routes out of Kalmar. She’d checked for Niamh and there was a night bus to Zadar, Croatia. One of its first major stops was near Copenhagen Airport. Niamh could get a flight from Copenhagen to Paris.
Using mind trickery to make the clerk forget they’d had the conversation, Niamh had returned to her room to shower and change into the fresh clothes Bran had provided. She conjured a bag from the nearest store and put her new clothes into it.
The bus terminal was quiet at midnight. There were only a few passengers, like her, waiting for the bus to Zadar. Every second she had to stand, ticket clutched in hand, waiting for the bus, was torturous. Any minute now, she expected Kiyo to appear and foil her plans.
Are you really going to hunt this woman and kill her?
Why was Kiyo now the voice of her conscience?
It was no business of his.
And Meghan O’Connor deserved it.
Ronan’s face, frozen in death, flashed before her eyes and her heart raced harder with determination.
By the time Niamh made it to Copenhagen Airport, it was just past four in the morning. She’d been a nervy, jangled mess on the bus, expecting someone—Kiyo or an enemy—to pop out of nowhere and stop her. But she’d made it. The next part of the waiting game was her flight to Paris. It didn’t leave until six-thirty in the morning.
Kiyo would wake soon, and although she knew it would be impossible for him to reach her in time, she still couldn’t wait to be more than four hours away from him.
No one could stop her.
Her mind was made up.
If she’d been provided with a vision of Meghan, it meant something. She was supposed to give Ronan justice. Maybe then, she’d find some peace at last.
The sound of a sharp beeping seeped through Kiyo’s consciousness and his lids fluttered reluctantly open.
It was the alarm on the hotel’s bedside table.
Groaning, he reached out and hit the top of it to shut the damn thing up. The time glared at him in neon red.
It was five in the morning.
They were supposed to meet this Stephen guy at Kalmar Airport in an hour.
Pushing up from the bed, Kiyo buried his head in his hands. He’d fallen asleep at seven thirty, which meant he’d slept for almost nine hours. No wonder he felt like crap. Kiyo was used to six hours a night. Anything longer made him feel drugged.
Damn it.
Rolling out of the bed, he decided to give Niamh a few minutes longer by taking a shower first. He hurried through his ablutions and tied his wet hair into a top knot.
Feeling more awake and refreshed, he set out to cross the hall and wake up his pain-in-the-ass charge. Anticipation thrummed beneath his skin.
To his dismay, he realized he was almost looking forward to the day ahead.
Nothing ever went to plan around Niamh. She definitely wasn’t boring.
Perhaps if he’d been more himself, he would’ve realized he hadn’t picked up on her scent when he stepped out into the hall. But he was so lost in his thoughts, it wasn’t until she didn’t answer his repeated knocks that he realized something was wrong.
Uneasiness settled over him. He grasped the doorknob and twisted until it broke, the electronic lock rendered useless. The door swung open and Kiyo marched inside Niamh’s room.
He took in the unmade bed and the fact that her scent barely lingered.
There was a stronger hint of it coming from the bathroom. He strode toward it, thrusting the door back against the wall. His nose lifted into the air and he followed her scent to a comb lying by the sink. It was one of the hotel’s free amenities. The cardboard packaging laid beside it.
Kiyo clutched the comb with Niamh’s tangled hair caught in its teeth. He almost broke it he gripped it so hard. She’d used the shower. The complimentary shampoo bottle was half-empty. There were soap suds on the bottom of it. A wet towel on the floor.
Hurrying back into the bathroom, his anger built as he swept the space for any trace of her. Nothing.
The new clothes Bran had provided were gone.
She’d left on her own.
Damn her!
Racing back into his room, he quickly gathered his shit into the duffle bag, throwing the comb in, too, and got out of there. To his annoyance, the woman on reception last night had been replaced by a guy. He questioned him anyway.
No, he hadn’t spoken to a young woman with long brown hair this morning.
Eyes searching the lobby, his gaze wandered high near the ceiling, and satisfaction slammed through him when he spotted the security camera. The guy at the front desk watched him suspiciously, so Kiyo pretended to make his way back to his room. Instead, as soon as he was out of sight, he searched for the hotel office. The security tapes were likely in there.
Finding the office, he also found a security camera trained on the door.
That was fine. He’d just need to steal the tape for that too.
Making sure no one was watching (which there wasn’t because it wasn’t even six o’clock yet), Kiyo tried the office door. Locked.
He took care of it and slipped inside, shutting the door quietly behind him. Dumping the duffle bag, he searched the room and found three small TVs and old-fashioned VCRs for the security tapes inside a walnut cabinet. Using the remote, he rewound the tape on the first TV, which was for the camera trained on the reception desk. To his dismay, he had to rewind the damn thing back to just before midnight. There she was.
Niamh. Leaving the reception area.
She hadn’t spoken to the desk clerk.
He frowned.
Winding it back further, he found her again.
At around eight thirty last night, Niamh appeared at reception and had a ten-minute chat with the female clerk.
He noted the dazed way the woman looked at her.
No doubt, she’d used her powers to make the receptionist forget their conversation.
His fury was a burn in his throat.
Abandoning the tape, he found the one for the office and ripped it out of the VCR. Hiding it in his duffle bag, he got out unseen and returned to reception. He didn’t even look at the guy behind the desk. He just kept walking until he was outside beneath the breaking dawn.
Compounding his anger was the fact that his fingers shook as he removed his cell to call Bran. He hated that he had to make this call.
Never in his life had he failed on a job.
Bran answered with, “It’s my nighttime, arsehole, so this better be good.”
Kiyo bared his teeth, wishing the vamp was there in front of him so he could take his bad mood out on him. He needed a fight. But no one challenged him like Fionn, so what was the point?
“I lost her.”
There was silence. Then, “You what?”
“I woke up this morning and she was gone. I checked the hotel tapes. She had a nice chat with the front-desk clerk last night and then around midnight, the tapes show her strutting her ass out of the hotel.”
“Did you question the clerk?”
“No point. I could tell Niamh had used that mind-fuck thing she does. And I know from watching her do it, she covers her ass. She’d have told the girl to forget their conversation.”
“Did anything happen last night after we spoke?”
The memory of Niamh convulsing in his arms came to him instantly. “She had a vision. She said it was the same one, but …”
She’d asked him about himself and had seemed more disappointed than usual when he didn’t answer. What did it mean?
“She might have been lying,” Bran said. “What about her room? Is there anything that might suggest where she went?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“Bran, this is what I do for a living. I have no leads other than Tokyo.”
The vampire was silent for so long, Kiyo thought he might have fallen asleep. He was about to growl his impatience down the line when Bran said, “Do you have anything of hers?”
“What do you mean?”
“An item belonging to her?”
“Yeah. A comb. Can we use it to find her?”
“Preferably, Fionn could come to the bloody rescue and use a tracing spell to find her. But, unfortunately, he and Rose are pretty far away at the moment. And I don’t trust any other magic user to find Niamh. So there’s only one solution.”
“What is it?”
“There’s an alpha in Scotland. He has a rare gift. For tracking.”
“Are you talking about Conall MacLennan?” Kiyo asked, surprised.
“You’ve heard of him?”
“Most wolves have. His is the last werewolf pack in Scotland, and he’s taken down any alpha who tried to win it from him.” Not to mention that once he had your scent, there was nowhere on earth you could hide from him. The wolf was a legend among their kind. “Why would you trust this guy?” Suddenly it hit him. “Wait—Conall is the werewolf who mated with one of the fae-borne and turned her?”
“Yeah, he’s the one. He was hired to hunt Thea. Instead he discovered they were true mates. The man that was after her … his son stabbed Thea in the heart with an iron knife. She was dying, so Conall bit her. Turns out, because they were mated, he could turn her into a werewolf. It’s one of the reasons the Faerie Queen wanted all the supernaturals out of Faerie. When she realized that a werewolf bite could destroy their immortality and turn them to mortal wolves, it didn’t make her happy. But it certainly made Thea and Conall happy.”
“So you think this wolf would be willing to help because Niamh is some kind of pseudo-sibling to Thea?”
“That, and Niamh was the one who convinced Thea to trust Conall. She had a vision, you see. Knew they were mated.”
He remembered Niamh mentioning she’d played matchmaker to not just Rose and Fionn but Thea too. “So I have to go to Scotland and get him to track Niamh using this item of hers?”
“Yup.”
“Wouldn’t it be faster to just call Fionn and get his ass back here?”
“He’s really, really far away.”
“How far?” Kiyo snapped.
“Like Oceania far.”
Dammit. “What the hell is he doing out there ?”
“Living his fucking life, wolf, all right? He didn’t know you were going to be so incompetent you’d lose the luscious Niamh in the first seventy-two hours.”
“You better hope you and I never meet, vamp.”
“Because I’m calling you a failure or because I think your charge is delicious?” He drawled the word delicious like he was imagining sinking his fangs into Niamh’s throat.
Kiyo held the phone away from him, afraid he’d crush the thing in an effort to ram his fist down the line and crush Bran’s windpipe.
“You still there?”
A growl rumbled from deep in his belly. “You’re straining my patience.”
“So I can hear. All right, then. Conall lives in a place in the Highlands called Torridon. We’re going to get Stephen to fly you to Inverness, which isn’t far. I’ll have Conall meet you there. I’ll call Stephen to let him know the change of plans, but you better get your arse to the airport now.”
Kiyo hung up to do just that.
He found the Honda Bran had left for them outside the hotel. As he drove toward the airport, he tried not to dwell on how angry he was. Not just at Niamh.
He was furious with himself.
Because something told him he could have prevented her taking off.
That didn’t mean he wasn’t still raging at the fae.
“She better have a good excuse,” Kiyo muttered.
And more than that … if anything happened to her …
If the Blackwoods or The Garm got to her first—
Don’t think about it.
He’d reach her first.
The alternative wasn’t an option.