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After listening to an issue that had come up in the bachelor household, Shaw and Cullen headed back to the main house. Checking the study, he found it was empty, and as they headed for the dining hall, Salem was headed down the stairs. She’d added some mukluks someone had found for her as well as having done her makeup and hair. She was gorgeous, but then he thought she was gorgeous soaking wet in the shower.
They heard an SUV pull up out in front and went outside to greet their guest. The lynx-shifter was a powerfully built man, although not quite as tall as Cullen.
“Cullen, thanks for having me. I’m going to assume the white tiger has been roaring in your ear, as well.”
“He has, but I suspect there’s more to the story than he’s letting on.”
“Agreed. And Special Agent Hubbard, how good to see you again.”
“Is he always this slick? He reminds me of the MBA gangsters we had in Seattle,” said Salem, not offering him her hand.
“MBA gangsters?” Colby asked, confused.
“Yes, the best of educations combined with the worst of their predecessors and a skewed view of their importance in the world. Why don’t we head inside?”
As they walked up the broad stairs to the front doors, Colby said, “You seem very much at home here.”
Salem turned toward Colby, walking backwards into the house. “Why shouldn’t I? It is my home, and in fact, we’ve only just discovered that one of my ancestresses helped found Ghost Moon Manor.”
Once they’d had lunch, the three of them adjourned with Jinx to Cullen’s office. Colby noticed the change in desks and quirked an eyebrow at Cullen.
“My mate and I prefer to share a partners’ desk and office space,” Cullen said in answer to the unasked question.
There was a quick look of longing that flashed over Colby’s face. Having found his own fated mate, Cullen had far more understanding and sympathy for the path the lynx-shifter traveled.
They pored over the documents Colby had brought with him. Jinx pulled up a document and moved it to the large screen.
“I found part of this information in redacted and highly classified documents in the SPU’s files. I cross referenced that with what we found where they were holding the prisoners along with some of the information Salem had put together, and that Cullen started having us gather. I reached out to the Resistance and got some help from them, as well.”
“Jinx, I know how hard you’ve been working, and down the road I’d love to be dazzled by how you got where you are, but I get the feeling time is of the essence,” said Salem.
“Right. Sorry. The bottom line is there is a blood moon coming, which is what scientists now call a lunar eclipse. In any event, the blood moon is supposed to draw upon the power of shifters—the more shifters involved in the ritual, the more powerful.”
“If I remember the stories about rituals, they always need real blood and the more powerful the ritual, the more blood that’s needed,” said Salem as the awful truth began to permeate the room.
“Those bastards meant to kill them all,” whispered Colby.
“And who better to do so than vampires. A blood ritual is right up their alley,” said Cullen. “They were collecting prisoners. They were planning the ritual. Jinx, when is the next lunar eclipse?”
Jinx’s fingers flew across the keyboard. “Two days—tomorrow night is when the blood moon will rise. But they lost their sacrifices.”
“They were holding fifteen shifters as prisoners. They’ll need at least that many to replace them,” said Cullen.
Colby nodded. “We got some people out of Reykjavik before we blew the place, but we thought at the time they didn’t have any other bases. Then we heard about the mill, and I sent Payne to check it out. He used it as a training exercise, and the unit got jumped.”
“That means they either have more prisoners, or are in the process of collecting more,” said Salem. “But where would they put them?”
“If the legends about your ancestress are true and given that we found both a vampire nest and the prisoners here on the peninsula, my guess would be somewhere in close proximity…” Cullen stopped. “Sweetheart? Where’d you put the Celestial Key?”
“It’s upstairs in our room; I’ll go get it,” Salem said, sprinting out the door and heading up the stairs.
Colby stared at Cullen in amazement. “You just leave a Celestial Key hanging around where anybody can get it?”
“No reason not to. The damn thing won’t work for anyone but Salem. Jinx, put up a star chart that encompasses the mill on one side and the ghost town on the other. Jinx wrote a program so that when the key shows us the location, the map feeds the necessary information into the computer, so we get the geo-coordinates.”
“My dear Jinx,” purred Colby, “you and I should chat when this is over.”
Cullen growled. “You and your pussycat clan couldn’t handle a she-wolf. Besides, she’s Salem’s new best friend.”
