Page 11 of Nightshade

“You’re hungry?”

I hissed in annoyance. “Yes.”

“So where are you from? How’d you get here?”

I was glad for the jacket over my head to hide the way my nose flared. He was being patient with me, and he hadn’t hurt me—or at least not intentionally. He could’ve left me to die, but he hadn’t even laughed at my circumstance yet.

Obviously, this was someone who might help me, someone I could use. And the last thing I ought to do was prove how annoyed I was and land myself without any aid at all.

“When the humans struck gold out in California, I followed them thinking they’d make easy prey while on the move.”

Leo let out a short, surprised breath. “Are you talking about the gold rush? That was more than a hundred and seventy years ago.”

I shrugged. “I was caught by witches.” When Leo grumbled, I folded the jacket so I could take in his darkened expression, and I felt a thrill. This was it—a mutual enemy. A point of connection. “I take it you know precisely who I’m talking about?”

Now I could see the difference between when he’d defended himself, and when he was actually angry. His face was sharper, more angular, when he clenched his jaw. His dark brow furrowed heavily.

I clutched his jacket tightly in both hands as I peered at him.

His anger, I could use. It wasn’t directed at me, but at the people who’d wanted to use me—who’d likely used his friends and family too.

Maybe, just maybe, this was my pathway to safety.

CHAPTER 7

Leo

The gold rush, for fuck’s sake.

He’d been held prisoner by Ermengarde’s lot since the goddamn gold rush. Not just “before I was born,” but like, over a hundred years before I was born. I wasn’t perfect with American history by any means, but didn’t they call the people who’d gone looking for gold “miner forty-niners”? And I didn’t think they meant nineteen-forty-nine.

And then he’d escaped from them and was running aimlessly through the forest.

Starving, probably. I couldn’t imagine the witches I’d seen in the pack square, with their shiny new black cars and fancy clothes, offering up their necks to feed a vampire they were holding prisoner. How had they even fed him? Bags stolen from the local blood bank? Small animals trapped in the woods? No, they wouldn’t be interested in trapping animals and handling them for someone else. Was there some kind of fae delivery service for blood?

I had kind of a bad feeling the answer wouldn’t be good, but I also didn’t want to ask. He seemed . . . well, I’d been around enough traumatized people in my life to recognize that something wasn’t right with him. He wasn’t stoic and silent like Viktor when he’d come home, but there was something familiar about the hunted look on his face.

Well, before he’d covered his face with my coat, which was its own kind of thing, wasn’t it?

Sure, yeah, he was hiding from the sun.

But also, he was just hiding.

He had pulled the coat off his face at some point, though, and . . . well, his cheeks were hollow and his skin was a strange shade of taupe, like maybe his natural shade was brown, but there was a gray undertone. I didn’t think that was natural to vampires, since that would make it pretty hard for them to blend in with humans and hunt them.

Even wrong as it all was, he was a beautiful man. Sharp features, longish chocolate-brown hair that fell in loose waves around his face, and deep dark eyes that . . . were clearly waiting on me for something.

What had he said? Oh, the witches. I sighed at that. “They worked with our previous alpha. He was”—I looked around, like I needed to make sure no one from the pack was nearby, like they wouldn’t have rushed in to see what was going on if they’d been here—“he was selling the others to them. For sex. And maybe other stuff, since they took Avery and never brought him back.”

He flinched at that. He tried to hide it, but in the years since Viktor had come home, I’d become an expert in seeing the tiny expressions that gave away how someone was feeling. Most of the time it was the only way I had any idea what was happening in my own twin’s head.

I watched Altair transform in that moment, though. He shoved his emotions down and straightened his spine, preparing to deal with me. I’d seen Viktor do it a thousand times in the years since his return, and instinctively, I knew that whatever Altair said next would be a pastiche of the truth and lies, put together in the way he thought would elicit the response he wanted.

With Viktor, what he usually wanted was for me to leave him alone and stop asking hard questions.

With this man? Well, he was a stranger, hungry and desperate, who’d been held prisoner for over a hundred years. No doubt whatever he said would be designed to get me to help him.

I could have stopped him right there and told him not to bother with the lies, because it didn’t matter what he said, I’d already made my decision, and I was going to help. But some part of me was curious about what he would say.