Chapter Twenty

Cella woke the following night to a pacing Cyrus.

Because they were beloveds, she could feel his emotions as easily as if they were hers, and his main one right now? Worry. She watched him stride from one side of the chamber to the other, head down, muscles taut. He was wearing jeans and nothing else, his gorgeous upper body honed from years of hard work on display.

Here she was, ogling him like a teenager, when he was clearly sorting through something.

Sitting up, she hugged her arms around her knees and watched him. It took only a few moments to consider the various things he might be worrying about and narrow them down to what the main reason might be.

“You want to see Midas,” she said, “but you’re worried about what the outcome will mean.”

He froze and turned slowly, his eyes a brilliant blue color that told her the tiger was firmly in control. He sighed deeply, and his eyes morphed to the mixed up gold and blue, when Cyrus was both creatures equally. “Yeah. First, what if I go off and try to bite him? I haven’t been around a shifter since I fed from Bridge and Tamar. I flat out don’t know what will happen when I’m around another shifter, let alone one as powerful as Midas. I’ve heard my whole life that shifter blood is more potent than human, and I don’t know what being around him will do to me.”

“I’ve been thinking about what happened with Bridge.”

“What about it?”

“Well, you were starving. When a newly turned vampire wakes up, their first thought is feeding. We often have more than one human ready to go because depending on the person, they might be ravenous and need a lot of blood. But you didn’t want human blood and I didn’t know you would need shifter blood, otherwise I could have arranged it for you.”

“What would it matter if there was a shifter there at the beginning or not?”

“Because the delay made the thirst exponentially worse. And I’ve seen it happen in humans too. If a food source isn’t readily available, it can make the vampire feel like they’re going to starve to death. Every minute that passes makes the need worse. It’s why we always have food on standby. I didn’t know when you were going to wake, so I had people ready to go outside the chamber.”

“If you’d had a shifter for me to feed from, I might not have tried to take off Bridge’s head?”

She shrugged. “I think so. There’s no way to know for sure, of course, because that didn’t happen. But it seems highly plausible to me. As far as attacking any shifter, I really don’t think that’s going to happen. Whatever it is about you that made you into a tribrid instead of a full vampire means that you’re in control of yourself in a way that other newly turned vampires aren’t. Your vampire isn’t going all gung-ho and trying to feed from anyone he can, he’s tempered with your tiger and human sides. I’m not saying we shouldn’t be cautious, but I don’t think you should worry about hurting someone.”

He hummed and rubbed his temples, then sat on the edge of the bed. “I want to know more about what I am.”

She gave his shoulder a squeeze. “I know. I have the codes to Mishka’s off-site storage facility. We can go there once the sun sets.”

He rolled his neck and sighed. “I’m sorry I’m being such a pain in the ass.”

“You’re not.”

“Of course I am. Aside from being an asshole when I first woke, I’m obsessed with what I am. I mean, I didn’t even ask you how your night went. I feel like I’m failing on all fronts right now.”

She chuckled. “You’re allowed to be obsessed about the situation because it’s important you figure out exactly what you are, including your strengths and weaknesses. And you could always ask me now about my night.”

He stretched out on his side and propped his head up on his hand. “Tell me about your night, beloved.”

“I had interviews for the food manager position.”

“How’d they go?”

She shrugged. “Meh. Of the three, two were wholly unqualified, and one asked right away how soon she’d be turned into one of us.”

His brows rose. “Humans really just ask that kind of thing?”

“Pretty much. You’d be surprised how many humans are just looking to be turned. They generally don’t know anything about us, only what they’ve read in books or online. It’s frustrating to be glamorized like that and not know if you can trust people.” Her mind flitted back to Quaid and how wrong she’d been about him.

“Humans can be like that with shifters, except we can’t actually turn a human into one of us. I wish I could help you find someone to take over the job.”

“Thanks. I’ll find the right person at some point. I just wish it would be sooner rather than later.” She didn’t mind working with the food, but it ate into her other responsibilities, not to mention how out-of-touch she felt with the family because she wasn’t in her regular office.

“I’m going to video chat with Midas,” Cyrus said.

“I’ll take a shower and get ready for us to head to the off-site location.”

He sat up enough to kiss her, brushing his fingers lightly over her skin until it goose bumped. She shivered and hopped from the bed. “If you do that kind of randomly sexy thing, neither of us will get anything done tonight.”

“I wouldn’t say we wouldn’t get anything done,” he drawled.

“I’m lucky you can’t compel me,” she said with a chuckle, remembering how he’d attempted to compel her several times over the course of the day. He never asked her to do anything she wouldn’t have wanted to do anyway – a sexy strip tease, for example – but she’d felt no extra push in her subconscious from him. She didn’t think there was any vampire ever who’d had the power to compel other vampires. It seemed to be a supernatural fail-safe of sorts, and she appreciated it. Even if it was fun trying.

She picked clothes out of the closet, choosing casual ones that she’d be more comfortable in for digging through Mishka’s collectibles. The moment she reached for the bathroom door, it locked, and she rattled the knob.

“Cyrus! Really?” She looked over her shoulder at him.

“I’m still testing out my powers,” he said, wiggling his brows.

“I thought you were going to call Midas.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he said, making a motion with his hand so the door unlocked.

She walked into the bathroom shaking her head at her beloved. By the time she showered, dried her hair, and dressed in leggings, a long top, and ankle boots, Cyrus was dressed and sitting on the couch with the tablet propped up with books on the coffee table. Cyrus waved her over and she sat next to him, smiling at Midas.

“Hello,” she said.

“Nice to see you again, Cella.”

Cyrus said, “I was just telling Midas about how different I feel, but also still tied to my tiger, and what that might mean for you and me and the ambush.”

Midas nodded. “I suggested we meet in a neutral location, and if all goes well, then he can come into ambush territory to meet with his parents, with me there of course, and then we’ll see where we stand.”

Cyrus looked at Cella. “What do you think?”

“I think it’s smart to meet somewhere neutral so you’re not surrounded by shifters. I’m confident that you’ll be fine, but I’m probably a little biased.”

“A little?” Cyrus snorted.

“You’re going to do some research?” Midas asked.

“Mishka believes he has some information on tribrids, but they’re so rare he may not have much, if he has anything at all,” Cyrus said.

“You could also check with the wiccans.”

“Why?” Cyrus asked.

“One of the Corners likes to read about shifter histories. Since the tribrid is technically a shifter, she might have something more than whatever Mishka has.”

“Do you know which Corner?” Cella asked. She’d met the North Corner, Lorene, years ago, but hadn’t met any of the others.

“Off the top of my head, no, but Lorene would know.”

“Thanks,” Cyrus said. He picked up his phone and poked around on the screen, and then a whooshing sound came from it. “I just texted you the location of a park about halfway between us. We can meet you there tomorrow, an hour after sunset.”

“Fine,” Midas said, picking up his phone and looking at it. “Good luck with your research, and feel free to take pictures of anything you find that will help us understand you better and send them my way.”

Cyrus nodded, thanked him, and ended the call. He sat back and exhaled loudly.

“That sounded promising,” she said, turning sideways to face him.

“Yeah. The question is whether when I see him if my vampire side is going to want to take a bite out of him. And also whether my tiger side is still enough of a part of me that I will recognize him as king so that you can join the ambush as my mate.”

“Do you think any of the ambush members will have a problem with you?”

“Maybe.”

“Some people must think we can’t control ourselves at all around shifters.”

“It’s what we’re raised believing. That putting ourselves in close proximity to vampires is straight-up foolish. Even after working with the vampire construction crew for weeks, my cousin still didn’t want his sister Aeryn working at the restaurant, simply because of the vampires.”

“Newbies can be aggressive, but I wouldn’t worry about a shifter dealing with one anyway. You’re generally stronger and faster than humans, and if you needed to get away from one of our kind, you could.”

He nodded and rose to his feet, offering her his hand. “Ready to go do some research?”

“After we eat, first. I’m starving.”

“Damn, I was so intent on finding out what we can about me that I forgot we need to eat.”

She chuckled and took his hand, leading him to the chamber door. “My growling stomach would have clued you in for sure.”

“I hope there’s a nice, rare steak waiting for me.”

“I’m certain there will be. The chef and his staff are really great about stocking what our people need.”

As she’d expected, they found several steaks for Cyrus, all what she would have considered barely cooked, but he raved about being perfect. While she sipped her reheated SyBl, she was amused by how much he enjoyed the steaks.

“I think it’s a prey thing,” he said.

“What is?”

He gestured to the remaining part of the third steak. “Why it satisfies me. I’m a tiger, which makes me a predator, and although a tiger wouldn’t go hunting on a farm necessarily, a cow is prey. I’m also part vampire, and that’s about the coolest predator around, but don’t tell Midas I said that.”

She grinned. “That makes sense. So you don’t mind being a vampire? Even if it’s mixed up with your tiger?”

He grasped her hand and gave it a squeeze. “Sweetheart, I get you, and however that happened, whatever cosmic stuff had to align in order for me to be sitting here with you – I love it and I’m grateful for it.”

She was more relieved every time he said he was grateful to be with her.

They finished their meal, stopped to check in with Mishka, and headed to the garage. Temple and Traz had volunteered to escort her and Cyrus to the off-site building, because the coven was still on alert for issues from the church. Cyrus and the other family members had helped to shut the church’s Cleveland office and many of their people had been taken into custody, so it wasn’t a far stretch to assume the church might retaliate at some point.

Cyrus opened the passenger door for her and she climbed into the plush second row seat of the SUV. He joined her, shutting the door and putting his arm around her as the vehicle left the garage. She and Cyrus talked about meeting with Midas the following night, and his hope that they’d find information about tribrids in Mishka’s collection so he could learn more about himself.

Temple entered a code into the security pad at the gate of the off-site building, which was a huge warehouse. The two-story building had no windows and was temperature-controlled, with remote access that Mishka kept tabs on.

“Has he always collected stuff?” Cyrus asked as he helped her out of the SUV.

“When he and I met, he had a small collection of old books that he kept locked up in a chest. We were traveling in the South and he found some other books, and then before I knew it, his collection was so large that it required two people to lift the chest because it was stuffed full and extremely heavy. He transferred the collection to a big safe he kept in his office, but it couldn’t hold the bigger items, so he used one of the offices for a long time. Then the club fire happened and he got paranoid, so now he’s got this unit.”

“I don’t understand why the church won’t just leave vampires alone. I mean, they don’t like your kind – so what? Why do they have to actively try to kill or harm vampires or those who are with them?”

“That’s a good question,” she said. The security door clicked as it was unlocked. They stepped into an alcove, and when the door was shut and locked behind them, she entered another code which unlocked the door. They entered a short hallway and she had to enter a third code, which finally opened a door that led to the warehouse.

“He’s pretty crazy about security,” Cyrus mused as he looked around the enormous space. There were rows of floor to ceiling shelves that extended from one end to the other, glass cases that held everything from swords to full suits of armor, and wooden racks loaded with weapons, many that he’d never seen before in his life.

She smiled at him. “Some of the things in here are worth a fortune. There are vampires and other collectors who would kill to have half of what he has here. The only person who knows everything that’s in here is Mishka, and this location is known only to the family and certain members of the coven. He also has a fallen angel who hunts for antiquities for him when he’s not acting as a guard for Arissa on Brone’s behalf.”

Cyrus looked around, taking in all that was stored in the room and said, “Pretty damn cool.”

“It will be, if we can find the books that he believes contain information on tribrids.” She pulled out her phone and opened the note app. “We’re heading into the stacks.”

“The stacks?” He followed her toward the back of the warehouse.

“That’s what we call his library. All the books and scrolls are arranged by category in a temperature-controlled section of the warehouse. It’s just a fancy name for bookshelves.”

They reached a glass-enclosed room and she entered a three-digit code, which allowed them inside. Before they stepped in, they put paper booties over their shoes and white gloves on their hands. He inhaled, sorting through the scents that lingered in the air. Leather, paper, fabric, and the faint scents of other vampires, shifters, and humans who had handled the materials at one time or another. His tiger and his vampire sat up in his mind in curiosity, wondering what they’d find.

“Here’s the directory,” she said, entering a password on a nearby computer.

He hummed and turned away, walking through the bookshelves. His senses were on alert, his cat and his vampire finding interesting and curious smells coming from the books.

“Cyrus?”

“I’m following my nose,” he called back.

She chuckled. “Ah, okay. Do your thing.”

He smiled at her turn of phrase and returned his attention to the scents that his inner beasts were demanding he follow. He found himself at the end of one of the rows, scanning the books with his eyes from shelf to shelf until he ended up squatting to peer at the bottom one. There, tucked between two thick books with titles on their spines related to phases of the moon, he withdrew a thin book with a black leather cover. He opened the book carefully, smelling the age of the paper pages that were scripted in a language he didn’t recognize.

Until he suddenly did.

Through his bond as Cella’s beloved, he recognized the language as French, which Cella had spoken fluently when she lived in France before she came to the States. He stood and carried the book to a small reading table and sat, scanning the pages. He wasn’t sure why he’d picked up the book, but he felt like it had been handled by someone like him once upon a time.

“What’s that?” Cella asked, setting several books down on the desk next to him.

He didn’t speak for several moments, and then he found the word he’d been looking for – tribrid. He pointed to the page, and Cella leaned over and read out loud, translating from French to English the story of a male wolf shifter who nearly died in a battle with another pack. He stumbled into a vampire coven’s territory and thought he’d be killed off, but instead a female vampire found him, drawn to him because they were beloveds. She and her coven saved his life, and the combination of different vampires’ blood and the fact he was a beloved mate, turned him into a tribrid, a mixture of wolf, vampire, and human. The coven brought countless humans to him for feeding, but he refused.

Cella sat in a chair and drummed her fingers on the table. “He wouldn’t feed from humans and nearly starved to death, turning into a ravening beast that couldn’t be controlled.”

Cyrus nodded. He continued the story, not as good at translating as Cella had been, but much better than he thought he’d be, considering he’d never spoken a word of French in his entire life. But that was something to think about another night.

“Until he found a shifter who was willing to feed him,” Cyrus continued, “and calmed the violent need within.”

He turned the page and found only one more paragraph, written in a different hand than the original, explaining that he died in a battle between his coven and his pack, and was laid to rest in honor in the crypt of the master vampire of the coven.

“That’s it?” Cella asked. He slid the book closer to her and watched as she inspected the pages, which had seemed promising, but ended so suddenly.

“It’s almost like whoever was keeping this account quit or died,” he said. “It was nice of whoever penned the last part to do so, at least we know what happened to him.”

“Not his name though,” she pointed out. She gave him a curious look. “How did you even find this?”

He shrugged. “My beasts. They led me here.” He lifted the book to his nose and inhaled. “It smells like one person that has three different parts to him. I wonder if the tribrid created the journal and someone from the coven added the end.”

“It’s possible.” She carefully flipped to the front of the book and looked for notations about the author or where it was from, and then she checked it against the computer. “There’s literally nothing in the computer about this book except that it’s here and about a shifter and vampire war. I think someone cataloged it wrong.”

“That’s okay,” he said. They turned their attention to the other books she’d gathered. As the night waned, they found nothing further about tribrids, save for one passage in a volume about shifters that said in a rare circumstance a newly turned vampire nearly killed her beloved mate during a feeding and he became a tribrid.

“It’s amazing to me that there’s nothing else about the phenomenon,” she said, leaning back in the chair and stretching.

“Yeah, I guess that means it’s so rare that no one bothered to keep track.”

She gave him a sad smile. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“We can still reach out to the wiccans.”

He stood and returned the book he’d discovered to its place on the shelf and caught up with Cella as she returned the others. When they’d tossed their paper booties in the trash receptacle outside of the room and put the gloves in a small laundry tote hanging on the wall, he took her hand and they headed toward the front door.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“I am. Although we didn’t find definitive proof that tribrids aren’t dangerous to shifters, or anyone else, I feel like the book that I found, coupled with the information in the ones you found, was helpful. Gives me hope that I’ll be able to be around my family without trying to take them out.” He held the door open for her and gave her a peck on the cheek. “Thank you.”

“For what?” she asked.

“For caring about what’s going on with me enough to come sit in a strange building and read old books.”

“Come on,” she said, rolling her eyes. “You’re my beloved, Cyrus. There isn’t anything on earth that I wouldn’t do to make you happy and help you.”

His whole being warmed from the inside out, and his cat let out a stuttering purr. Catching her gently by the arm, he pulled her against him and cupped her face, gazing down at his gorgeous, sexy vampire.

“Cella, I love you. I loved you from the moment I scented you in the restaurant, and I count myself the luckiest male on the planet that I get to wake up next to you forever.”

Her eyes glittered with emotion as she cupped his hand and held it against her face. “I love you too. I’m so glad you’re mine.”