Chapter 16

They spent the day in dugout shelters around the mouth of Rocky Creek. Carwyn and Brigid were the last to hide, taking their time to make sure that all the rest of the hunting party was well concealed and nothing was visible from the surface.

They'd reached the mouth of the creek with an hour of darkness to spare, which gave them just enough time to excavate shelters, store weapons, and generally make themselves invisible to any humans passing by.

Brigid lay in the small refuge Carwyn had dug, tucked against the vampire with the biggest heart she'd ever known. "You're thinking about Summer, aren't you?"

"She's not asleep right now," he said. "Or I doubt it. I doubt sleep is very comforting to her."

"Do you think she's still at the farm?"

"Yes. That's why we're heading upstream."

"Why?"

"Because I think if she were free, she'd have found help by now. It's been two full nights and two days since Daniel was found. If she'd made it out, she'd have gotten back to town in that time."

Brigid curled closer into his chest. "I was nothing like that when I was human."

"What do you mean? You are one of the most competent women I've ever known. And I've known quite a few."

She smiled. "I could find my way in Dublin, tell you where to find criminal elements and where the safe neck of the woods were. I knew the city, but surviving in the wild?" She shook her head. "I'd have been bear breakfast out here as a human."

"You'd have learned if that's what your native environment was," Carwyn said. "Summer's family told her that wilderness survival was important, so she learned it."

"My family taught me that knowing ancient languages was important, but I didn't learn those, Carwyn. Your argument might have a few holes."

His arms came around her and snugged her to his chest. "You'd make it. If you had to? You'd figure it out. I have no doubt at all."

"Why?"

"Because you're a survivor, Brigid Connor. That's what you do."

When he held her close, pressed her skin to the roughness of his clothes or the fine curling hairs along his skin, she felt the fire that lived in her retreat. Carwyn somehow knew when she was most on edge, and he used that knowledge to defuse her. Many nights she felt like she was walking the edge of explosion.

Not unlike the giant ticking time bomb Ivan presented.

She felt sleep starting to reach for her, but she fought it. "Ivan. If Baojia kills him—"

"He's rogue. No one would blame him. Even Ivan's sire would struggle to find a justification to avenge him."

"But that could happen? Does anyone know who his sire is?"

"No idea at all. And as I said, when it comes to the unwritten rules of vampire politics, Ivan is already dead. Operating in foreign territory without the permission of the vampire in charge isn't done, Brigid. Not without consequences. The mere fact that he's here and doing anything challenges Katya's leadership. She has to see him dead, or she'll be seen as weak. And you don't become the ruler of a territory like Katya's without being ruthless."

Brigid pictured the smooth, pale complexion and wide eyes of Katya Grigorieva. The vampire wore fuzzy slippers to meetings and schoolgirl braids in her hair. The idea that her facade hid a ruthless predator was hard to imagine, but not impossible. After all, Brigid had seen both humans and immortals at their worst; she had no illusions that a pleasing facade couldn't hide the worst monster imaginable.

"Go to sleep." Carwyn ran his finger through Brigid's cap of hair. He teased her nape and played with the longer feathers around her temples. "I'll wake you at dusk. We're going to have a long night ahead of us. Even if we find Ivan's farm, we're going to need time to surveil it, see what the best approach should be."

"He's already killed enough humans." Brigid's eyes began to droop as sunrise tugged at the sky. "Not any more. Not a single…"

She was out.

She woke to gentle hands stroking over her neck and a hard body pressed against her.

Someone was hungry.

Brigid turned to him, knowing her mate by his scent, his touch, and the amnis they shared. If she were blind, she would know him. If she lost her sense of hearing, she should know him. Nothing in the world would allow her to mistake any other for the man who possessed her heart.

In the darkness of the earth around them, Brigid wrapped her arms around his shoulders and he moved over her, spreading her legs as he entered her.

Their union was silent and slow, their bodies cradled by the earth he commanded. The cave he'd created was warm from Brigid's heat, her amnis burning with a low intensity that Carwyn's absorbed. Their bodies flowed together in one heated tangle of arms and legs, and when Brigid came, the sigh she released was the single sound that echoed in the darkness.

Carwyn came moments after, his body tensing before he climaxed with a soft groan.

He pulled her limp body over his chest. "What a wondrous creature you are."

She closed her eyes, her body and blood alive with energy, tied to this mountain of a vampire who was her anchor in the world. "I love you so much."

He stroked his fingers through her hair. "Words are not enough."

She cocked her head up to look at him, but there wasn't even a hint of light for her vampire vision to latch on to. "Words are all we have though." She pressed her ear to his chest. "I wonder what your heart used to sound like."

His immortal heart beat, but not as often as a human heart. No one in a thousand years had heard Carwyn's human heart, and Brigid was oddly sad about that.

"If you put your ear up to a cow, you'll probably get a decent facsimile," he murmured.

"Yer such an odd man. I love you, but you are so odd."

"You know what I found myself wondering the other day?"

"About cows?" Brigid closed her eyes and settled into his embrace. These quiet, rambling conversations were one of her favorite things about being married to Carwyn, and they usually ended with one or both of them dissolving into laughter.

"I was wondering" —his thumb brushed along the edge of her eyebrow— "what you would look like with wrinkles."

She snorted. "Isn't that one of the benefits of having to drink blood every night for the rest of my life? I don't have to worry about those."

"I was just wondering." His smile was in his voice. "I think you'd be adorable with little wrinkles along your eyes." He tapped her nose. "What do they call them? Crow's-feet?"

"Even the name is horrid!" She turned over and propped her chin on his chest. "Men get wrinkles and the whole world sees them as distinguished and proper. You get to be ‘silver foxes.' Women get crow's-feet. What does that even mean? I cannot believe the witch connotations are accidental."

"Oh no, I'm quite sure they're not." His thumb ran along her jawline. "What can I say? I daydream about growing very old with you and having great-grandchildren running around, making us laugh and telling us stories about whatever mad thing the humans will have invented by then."

He was a creature of family who had done everything he could to re-create in the vampire world the human family he'd lost. He'd sired a dozen children and seen their clans, both human and vampire, grow and flourish. He'd watched over them like a protective father.

And then he'd met her.

"I think we need to visit Cochamó soon." Brigid rubbed the back of her fingers along Carwyn's rough jaw. "You need to be with Isabel and Gus for a while. Be around all their people. Watch the nippers and hear some stories."

Isabel was one of Carwyn's oldest daughters, and she and her mate had their own children, both human and vampire. They lived in an isolated valley in South America where they ranched and farmed. It was a place of music and dancing. A place where a family dinner meant roughly a hundred people coming over.

His hand gripped the back of her neck. "You always get uncomfortable at Isabel and Gus's."

"And when I do, I spend some time on my own and then I'm fine." She scooted up and kissed him. "You always take care of me, Carwyn. Let me take care of you too. Once we find Summer, stop Ivan, make sure everything is good here, let's go to Cochamó."

"Are you sure?"

"Very sure. I'll even voluntarily get in a boat if we can't borrow Giovanni's plane."

He hugged her tightly. "It's a grand idea, Brigid. Thank you."

One by one as the sun sank beneath the horizon, the vampires emerged from the earth, shaking off dust and washing their faces in the river. They broke out bottles of blood-wine to feed their appetites, and a few of Baojia's men ran off when they heard a deer in the forest.

It was a dirty, ragged bunch of warriors, and they pleased Carwyn's nose immensely. The city smell had been overwhelmed by the scent of earth, forest, roots, and rot. The evening fog curled around the water vampires, drawn to their amnis, and the ground rippled happily when Carwyn dug his hands into it, filling the hole he'd dug for shelter and restoring the land to what it had been.

Baojia had brought one wind vampire with him, a nimble woman with dark curling hair cut short around her head. She wore black, as all his soldiers did, and her skin was a deep, rich brown; when she took to the air, she moved like a shadow.

"Daxa transferred to San Francisco two years ago from Bangladesh." Baojia stood next to Carwyn, staring at the disappearing shadow. "Lucky for me. She's young, just looking to stretch out from her sire's organization. Get some experience working for someone else."

"Her sire have connections with Katya?"

Baojia nodded. "Old friends. Trading partners."

"She's open to new talent." Carwyn looked at Baojia. "Your boss. That's good to know."

Baojia nodded. "Coming from an organization that was all about blood ties, seniority, and connections, it's been a real shift for me. A good one."

"What's the plan for tonight?" Carwyn asked.

Baojia's soldiers were quickly erasing any trace of their presence from the riverbank, and Natalie, Jamie, and Ross were standing by Rocky Creek, ready to go.

"You lead the way," Baojia said. "Daxa is flying overhead, looking for any air cover and scoping things out. If she sees anything, she'll report back. I told her we'd be keeping to the creek."

"Correct." Carwyn waved Brigid over. "Are we ready?"

Brigid looked over her shoulder. "Have you seen Ross and Jamie? Jamie's been ready all day."

The corner of Baojia's mouth turned up. "Let him know that he'll be able to join Lin and Brady tomorrow morning if he likes. They're the human couple on the team, and they keep up. They were scouting around today while we were in the ground."

Brigid nodded. "I'll tell him. Let's hope we can make good enough time that we'll have a bead on the farm before dawn."

Baojia nodded toward the stream, looking at Carwyn. "We're ready when you are."

Carwyn walked to the creek and took out the sweatshirt Summer had been wearing in Seattle. He inhaled deeply, thinking of the young woman's picture and holding it in his mind with the intricate scent of apples, salt, and vanilla, trying to find the thread that was Summer within all the artificial scents of the modern world.

He could sense it, but it wasn't clear yet. "Follow the water." He began walking up the center of the creek, companions falling behind him as he took in the smell of the land around him.

Pine and cedar, salt and earthy moss. The forest was lush with life, but Summer's scent was too diffuse to point in a specific direction.

Follow the water.

Carwyn kept walking, his pace slow and steady. He didn't want to miss a single thread that might lead him in the correct direction.

An hour up the creek, Carwyn spotted an unusually high table sitting on the edge of the creek. "What is it?" he asked Natalie.

"That? Oh, it's probably a fishing platform," Natalie said. "In the spring when the water is really high, that's gonna be your safest way to fish in the creek. Getting anywhere near the water is really dangerous."

"But it's not now?" Carwyn looked down at the center of the stream where the water came nearly up to his knees.

"No, this is nothing. See the marks on the side?" Natalie asked. "Those are to measure high water. The past few years have been dry, but that's a change. Usually, creeks this size are twice as big, even getting into the end of the dry season like now."

Carwyn kept his eyes ahead, noting the twisting stream and exposed rocks. Every now and then, he got a strong hit of Daniel's scent and knew that the young man had fallen down this creek like the fishermen thought, bumping along the rocks and snags along the bank until he was found.

"Daniel came this way," Carwyn said. "I can smell his blood."