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As Xhex marched up the trail like she was heading to her own execution, Blade tracked his sister through the pines, making sure that he stayed downwind and behind her. He was also careful to monitor her vicinity. That male of hers, John Matthew, was bonded, and he had big friends, so there was a chance that there were members of the Black Dagger Brotherhood nearby.
It wasn’t that he couldn’t handle them. He had too much on his mind to be bothered—and the fact that Xhex had shown up tonight, while he was already wrestling with so much, was just fabulous.
Exactly what he needed.
Her mood seemed no less sore than his own, however. Walking up the main trail, she stopped regularly, but not because she was taxed physically. She was in prime condition, a true specimen of afemale, capable of feats of strength and cunning that made her just as deadly as any male.
No, she halted from time to time because she was searching for something, and he wondered what would bring her here with such dark expectation.
Then again, her grid was in shambles. The collapse that had been threatened had in fact occurred, the three-dimensional structure of her emotions and her consciousness utterly disbanded. Something had happened since he had seen her last—and so recently, too.
You are better at caring for others than you wish to acknowledge.
Shut up, he thought back at the voice of that “old woman.”
Memories of the entity, or whatever it was, had dogged him since the moment the thing had supposedly departed. To the point where he felt hounded. Pursued. Even though there was never aught in his wake. Indeed, he had left the confines of the cave shelter after darkness had arrived to try to find some peace—and his sister’s path up the mountain had intersected his winding way down. As if things had been planned.
Or mayhap “inevitable” was the word.
It was hard to know when he made the decision to allow his presence to be known, but at some point, halfway to the top, he stepped in some distance behind her. As his strides were slightlylonger than hers, the gap between them was gradually closed as the ascension progressed.
And yet Xhex persisted in her forward orientation, her attention remaining upon what was before her and off to the sides, but never what was in her rear.
The absence of a reaction—or any awareness at all—struck him as alarming. After which, it dawned on him that she was, in fact, totally alone.
“Xhex.”
The instant he said her name she pivoted, her hand pushing into her leather jacket and fumbling around for something.
“Do not shoot me,” he said, assuming a bored tone.
You care for things more deeply—
“Shut. Up.”
Xhex stopped with her searching, her dark brows slamming down over her gray eyes. “I haven’t said shit.”
Gritting his teeth, he forced a smile. “That was not intended for you. And are you… unarmed?”
He hadn’t noticed before, but there was no scent of gunpowder on her. Which was not her normal course of things.
Alone? With no personal protection? Where thefuckwas her mate—
“Then who’s it for,” she countered. “And what the hell are you doing following me.”
No surprise she left the weapons questionunacknowledged. And he told himself it was not his place to worry over her.
He did not believe that lie, however.
“You came to the mountain, sister mine. I was already here,” he intoned grimly.
She glanced around. “So you think you own all this now?”
“No, but if you’re accusing me of tracking you, I have every right to point out the fact that you arrived where I reside, not the other way around.”
“Your home is the Colony.”
“By birthright, so is yours.”
