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Corinne stared down into her mug. "Hunter is a bit ... intimidating, but I've seen the good in him. He's honorable and courageous, like you and Savannah know Gideon to be."
Amelie gave a low grunt. She was still holding Corinne's right hand, her thumb rubbing idly over the teardrop-and-crescent-moon birthmark. As she continued to trace the outline of the small mark, Corinne realized she was studying it. "It's just like hers," she murmured, her smooth brow creasing. "Savannah has this very same birthmark, except hers is on her left shoulder blade. Mama used to say it was the place where the fairies kissed her before placing her in Mama's womb. Then again, Mama was a bit touched herself."
Corinne smiled. "Every Breedmate is born with this mark somewhere on her body."
"Hmm," the old woman mused. "I guess that makes you and Savannah sisters of another kind, then, doesn't it?"
"Yes, I suppose it does," Corinne agreed, warmed from both the tea and her hostess's kind acceptance. "Have you lived here for a long time, Amelie?"
She gave a bob of her grayed head. "Seventy-two years I've been in this very spot. Born right in that other room, matter of fact. Same as Savannah, though by the time she came along, I was already grown and old enough to help deliver her. I've got twenty-four years on my baby sister."
Seventy-two years old, Corinne thought, studying the aged face and silvery gray hair. If not for the Ancient's blood that had been forced upon her all the time she'd been in Dragos's laboratory prison, her body would be roughly twenty years more weathered than Amelie Dupree's. It seemed ironic to her now that the very thing she despised - the life-giving nutrients from a creature not of this earth - had allowed her to survive Dragos's torture. It had kept her strong when all she'd wanted was to lie down and die. It was because of that alien blood that she had a son out there somewhere, a piece of her heart that she worried was slipping farther and farther out of her reach.
"Do you have other family?" she asked Amelie when the ache in her chest started to be more than she could bear.
The elderly woman beamed. "Oh, my, yes. Two daughters and a son. I've got eight grandbabies too. My kin is all spread out now. The kids, they never did love the swamp the way I do. It's not in their blood, in their bones, the way it is with me and my late husband. They took off to the cities as soon as they were able. Oh, they come to see me every week or so, make sure I'm getting on all right and help take care of things around the house, but it's never enough.
'Specially the older I get. Age makes you want to hold everyone you love close as you can."
Corinne smiled and gave the warm, age-lined hand a gentle squeeze. She was glad for the elderly woman's blindness in that moment, grateful that the tear leaking from the corner of her eye would go undetected. "I don't think you need to be old to feel that way, Amelie."
The kindly woman's face tilted slightly, a thoughtful expression coming over her features.
"Has it been a long time since you've seen yours, child?"
Corinne stilled, suddenly wondering if the cloudy eyes saw more than she assumed. Feeling ridiculous, she lifted her free hand and waved it briefly in front of Amelie's gaze. No reaction whatsoever. Had the old woman somehow peered into her mind? She glanced over her shoulder, making sure Hunter was nowhere that he might overhear. "How could you possibly know - "
"Oh, I'm not psychic, if that's what you think," Amelie said around a soft chuckle.
"Savannah's the only one in our family line with any kind of true gift. According to Mama, the girl was more gypsy than Cajun, but who's to say? Savannah's daddy was little more than a rumor in our family. Mama never seemed eager to speak of him. As for me, I've just midwived enough years to recognize a woman who's given birth. Something changes in a woman after she's brought a life into the world. If you're sensitive to such things, you can feel it - like an intuition, I guess."
Corinne didn't try to deny it. "I haven't seen my son since he was an infant. He was taken away from me soon after he was born. I don't even know where he is."
"Oh, child," Amelie gasped. "I'm so sorry for you. I'm sorry for him too, because I can feel the love you have for him in your heart. You need to find him. You must not give up hope."
"He's all that matters to me," Corinne replied quietly.
But even as she said it, she knew that wasn't entirely true. Someone else was coming to matter to her as well. Someone she wanted to trust with the truth. Someone she felt sick at having pushed away and lied to, when he'd shown her nothing but tenderness. She hated the wall he was erecting between them. She wanted to tear it down before it got any higher, and that meant opening herself up to him completely. She wanted to trust him, and that meant giving him the power to prove her right ... or wrong, if she turned out to be the fool. All she knew was she had to give him that chance.
"Will you excuse me for just a moment, Amelie? I want to see what's keeping Hunter."
At the old woman's nod of agreement, Corinne got up from the table and walked back through the front of the house. Before she even got out to the porch, she saw that Hunter and the purple car were gone.
He had left for his mission without even saying a word.
Murdock came back to consciousness on a choked scream.
Chase watched the vampire flail and struggle on the chain that held him suspended by his ankles from the central beam of an old, empty grain silo somewhere deep in podunk. Blood ran from the hours-old lacerations and contusions that riddled the Agent's naked body. The air inside the silo was bitter cold, added torture for the son of a bitch who'd stubbornly refused to tell Chase what he needed to know.
For most of the daylight hours they'd spent within the rat-infested shelter, Chase had tried beating the intel out of Murdock. When that didn't work, and when Chase's thin patience had started to snap with the setting of the sun outside and the pricking of his thirst, he'd picked up Murdock's own blade and tried slicing the truth from him.
At some point, the vampire had passed out. Chase hadn't noticed until his own hand was bathed in the other male's blood, the big body drooping limply, unresponsive to any amount of inflicted pain.
And so Chase had put down the blade and waited.
He watched Murdock struggle back to alertness, chains jangling in the enclosed shelter. The male coughed and spit blood onto the floor some six feet beneath his head. A large stain already lay on the filthy concrete, the congealing pool of blood and piss soaking into the moldy remnants of long-forgotten livestock feed and scattered, ice-encrusted vermin droppings. The glossy puddle of fresh red cells drew his eye like a beacon, making him yearn to forget this business that needed to get done and instead head out to hunt.
Murdock bucked and thrashed, hissing when his bleary eyes met Chase's unblinking stare from across the floor of the silo. "Bastard!" he roared. "You don't know who you're fucking with!"
