CHAPTER ONE
Five days had passed, and he could still feel the soft fabric slipping through his fingers.
Alistar Kostas braced a hand against the wooden mantle as he stared into the fire. He saw through the flames, past them, to the moment he’d had his hands on the white-haired witch.
Mariah.
She’d killed his teammate that day.
Had almost killed his best friend’s mate, Maddie Broussard.
And dammit if she hadn’t gotten away.
One second, he’d had a hold of her, and the next she’d dislodged his grip, whirling into the smoke, chaos, and darkness.
Alistar was old enough, experienced enough, to know that sometimes you didn’t get your man.
Or woman, as it were.
But in this case, he couldn’t help but think he’d fucked up somehow. The whole Ring had been on the hunt ever since, but she’d vanished. She’d been prepared with an escape plan.
“Staring at that fire isn’t going to fix anything,” Basil’s voice carried across the room.
He felt the energy in the room shift, heard the steady thump of her heartbeat as she approached.
“I know.” Knowing, however, didn’t mean he was going to stop replaying that night over and over in his mind.
Very few things haunted him. Mostly because there was so much material that could torture him if he let it; he’d become a master at burying memories. Locking down his emotions. Compartmentalizing.
It was what made him lethal.
“I know it doesn’t happen to you very often, but sometimes you don’t win,” she said, compassion and understanding lacing her tone. Her words wrapped around him like a balm, and he appreciated that she didn’t pile onto his guilt.
Alistar pushed away from the fireplace.
The truth was hard to swallow sometimes.
Basil, as usual, was perched on the arm of one of the leather sofas that flanked the fireplace in the Rally room. Her clingy yoga pants and black tank top showed off her lean body. Dark lashes framed blue eyes that held the same frustration and determination he saw in the rest of the team.
“Any word yet on Pascal’s—” He bit off the words. There was no replacing a team member. They’d get a new one to round out their Ring. But no one would ever replace him. “Our new teammate?”
Basil watched him for another second before shaking her head.
She was too perceptive. Always looking beneath the obvious, ferreting out the truth.
He really needed her to stop looking at him like she was figuring out all his secrets. As it was, he took extra shifts. Worked out at all hours. Trained in their state-of-the-art simulator. Rarely joined anyone for meals.
He let his fellow guardians think it was because he was looking for the white-haired witch. That was mostly true. But not entirely.
He tried his hardest to not close his eyes. Sleep only led to dreaming of her. An elusive beauty. Except he’d never actually seen her face. He didn’t have to.
She had the most amazing hands. Soft but strong, capable. Hands that tortured him over and over, leaving him teetering on the edge of extasy night after night.
A graceful neck that called to his lips. In his dreams, his body knew hers. Intimately. For the last week, he’d dreamt of her every day, but he was never fulfilled.
The phantom touches were driving him mad.
He hated dividing his focus, especially when the white-haired witch was so dangerous. Who knew where she’d pop up again? Or when.
Now, he was running on fumes.
“I was going to ask you the same question,” she said, combing her fingers through her short hair, mussing the lime-green streaks. They’d all been waiting for word from The Council of Elders about their sixth.
Unfortunately, trouble in New Orleans wasn’t the only problem on The Council’s radar.
Alistar took a seat opposite her and rested his forearms on his knees. Steepling his fingers, he stared at one of the tufted buttons on the other sofa.
“You’re scheduled to go to the Castle next week, right?” she asked.
“Yeah.” Which meant there wasn’t much time to help the team come up with leads.
“Maybe Vivitara will know something about our new ringmate. Perhaps the Council has been in contact with her.”
Like Basil, Vivitara was gifted with foresight. The leader of the Stigward academy was legendary. Sometimes her visions were so spot-on, it was like she’d visited the future.
Vivitara also benefited from insider information. The brunette bombshell had a direct line to the Council of Elders; was a key member of their decision making.
And since she trained every recruit, she knew them all by name. She’d have someone in mind to fill Pascal’s shoes.
Hopefully, whomever they sent would be easier to get along with. But more importantly, they needed someone soon. Without a member of their team, dynamics and schedules were off. And it was starting to wear on everyone.
“Have you figured out how Mariah found Maddie’s location?” Basil asked, her voice soft, as if she didn’t want to irritate him further.
Alistar’s jaw clenched.
That was another dagger in his side. Even as they’d been on the chopper on their way to the warehouse where Maddie had been held, he’d been trying to figure it out.
The puzzle pieces didn’t fit.
Dax had taken Maddie upstate to a remote academy for paranormal students. Maddie was a newly minted witch, needing to learn how to wield her powers. And somehow, Mariah and her disciples had found the location and kidnapped Maddie.
“How’d you know?” he asked. He hadn’t mentioned his ongoing curiosity to the team because they were all neck deep in the hunt. Finding Mariah was more important than figuring out how she’d found Maddie.
He had no leads, and only his gut telling him that things didn’t add up.
Basil tipped her head back and laughed. “You forget we’ve been on the same team for years. I know when something’s bothering you.”
She slipped down onto the sofa cushion.
“It’s been bothering me too,” she added. “But with everything else going on—”
The whole team was running on empty. Keeping the peace in a city as large and paranormally diverse as New Orleans was hard enough. Adding chasing every clue that came their way about the white-haired witch was insanity.
Still, he tried to find a bright side.
“We got Maddie back. I’m glad about that. She and Dax are in honeymoon mode. But—”
“It never should have happened,” Basil filled in.
Alistar nodded.
It’d been a long week since they’d stormed that abandoned warehouse north of New Orleans. Mariah, a demented witch, had kidnapped and held Maddie, the granddaughter of City Councilwoman Broussard. A white witch. A good witch.
Days before, Mariah had murdered the councilwoman in her own home, in front of Maddie.
And Alistar had had her in his grasp. He’d been a second away from binding her powers and locking her up.
His hands balled into fists.
“I never thought I’d miss his pretentious, uptight ass,” Basil said, filling the silence.
Alistar nodded once.
Without Pascal’s abrasive personality, there was a lot less tension in the Stigward house these days, but he was starting to think that their teammate and his peculiarities had kept them on their toes.
Exacting standards could do that.
Regardless, he’d been a brother to them. An invaluable member of their team, and his loss was glaring.
“Any luck on your latest search?”
Alistar sighed and rose to his feet. He stepped over to the bank of monitors on the wall. A tall, rolling table held the wireless keyboard and mouse.
Despite his current desire to fully integrate modern technology with the Stigward, the Council was understandably reluctant. He didn’t want a list of vampires, werewolves, and others available for the taking any more than they did.
DPS would have a field day with such a record. Hell, it’d do their job for them. The Department of Paranormal Studies spent a large portion of their time trying to locate paranormals so they could use them as lab rats. Removing that barrier would be…
Alistar shuddered at the thought.
But as it was, the lack of database meant Alistar’s job was harder. The feed from his body cam had gotten corrupted during the transfer. And no one else’s had gotten a useable photo.
Finding one witch out of billions of people, with nothing more than a first name and an image in his head, had never been so tough.
He’d have better luck finding a designated driver on Bourbon Street during Mardi Gras.
“We’re going to find her,” Alistar said. There was no doubt in his mind. He just might need a minor miracle.
“I wish we’d been able to get more out of the shifter,” Basil said, glancing toward the back of the house where the holding cells were. The Council of Elders had sent for the shapeshifter, a former informant, who’d strolled right into the Stigward stronghold and tried to shoot Maddie. “If I’d had more time, I could have found the right pressure point.”
Alistar gave a low growl of agreement. Ordinarily, the lone female member of the team was exceptional at getting the facts out of captives. The shape-shifter wasn’t their only card to play, though.
“That bloody human,” Alistar muttered. During their battle at the warehouse, they’d captured one of Mariah’s henchmen, which was something, at least. If they couldn’t have the white-haired witch, at least they had one of her underlings.
Much to Alistar’s frustration, the human hadn’t said a word.
It was true that Alistar had lost respect for humans around the time he’d become a vampire. They’d never helped him. They’d tortured him.
They could all drop dead as far as he was concerned…except for the fact that he needed their blood to survive.
“I can’t believe I can’t break him,” Basil mused, sounding thoughtful and far away. “It’s got to be a record.”
“I can’t believe he didn’t take one look at you and trip over himself to tell us everything.”
Basil’s lips quirked to the side. She knew she was gorgeous, in a badass-pixie sort of way. Men lost their minds over her, but she always let them down gently. Unless they deserved otherwise.
And to her credit, she didn’t use her looks as a weapon.
There were plenty of men, and lots of women, in this world that would happily spill their guts to the blue-eyed beauty.
Even with her spiky, green hair, there was a charm about her. A graciousness that disarmed people.
Except for the man in their cell.
“He must be gay, or infatuated with the witch.”
“Or he’s just had training,” Basil said, as she strode over to the wall of screens.
He had maps, lists, photos. And none of it was adding up. They needed a new perspective as much as they needed new information about Mariah.
The problem was, Alistar was too in his head. Too entrenched in what had happened that night, and he’d memorized all the information on the screens.
Basil glanced at the clock centered over the monitors, the numbers glowing red.
“You need to bounce. Get out of here. Go out with the guys. Get laid. Something.”
“I need to catch her,” he pointed to the blurry, chest-cam photo. The best shot anyone’s camera had gotten before she’d slipped through his fucking fingers.
Basil sighed. He heard her frustration and knew that she was as stressed as he. More so because Alistar had become obsessed with it. But he also heard her good humor.
“We’ve got an hour until our shift. Want to go over it again?” she asked.
He did but at this point, he was spinning his wheels.
Regardless, he pulled up the dossier they’d put together on Mariah and the man in their cell. For now they called him Hades, because they didn’t have any other ID on him.
“Hades. Fingerprints come back a John Doe. Human. We estimate he’s early- to mid-thirties. Well trained.”
The phone on the center of the conference table rang. It was the ringtone for The Council. Alistar hit a button on his keyboard that connected the call.
“New Orleans,” Alistar answered.
“I need to speak to your ringleader.” Despite the fact they considered themselves equal, each team of six Guardians followed the orders of the most-senior member.
Alistar glanced over at Basil, who nodded and headed out the door.
“He’s on his way.”
“Thank you.”
Less than a minute later, Rhyse strolled into the room, Basil on his heels. Six feet, five inches of kick-ass hybrid; smart, capable, calm. And the man in charge of their little group of peacekeepers.
“Rhyse van Aert,” he said, bracing his hands against the edge of the conference table.
“One second please,” the feminine voice said.
A moment later, a man came on the line. “Are we on a secure line?” he asked, but sounded as if he was speaking to someone in the room with him.
“Of course, sir,” the woman answered.
“Rhyse?”
“This is Rhyse.”
“I have news for you. It’s not good. We’ve had a report of another witch disappearing. This time, in Maine. We’ve sent the details.”
Alistar did some quick, mental math. That was seven witches missing in the last month.
“I’m sending you some help, since your team is down a member,” Ksilvanté said. “We need to figure out what’s going on, and what this Mariah wants.”
“Couldn’t agree more,” Rhyse agreed.
“You’ll continue leading the investigation. You and your ring. Report your findings directly to the Council. The Elders…they don’t have a good feeling about this.”
“None of us do.”
“Lexi should be there any minute. Best hacker this side of the Atlantic Ocean.”
“Hacker, sir?” Rhyse frowned as he met Alistar’s gaze.
“Report when you have something.” Ksilvanté’s tone turned brusque, and brooked no argument. Not that any Stigward member would willingly argue with the man who’d founded the whole organization.
“Will do.”
The call disconnected, and there were several beats of silence as he, Rhyse, and Basil glanced at each other.
The Stigward were alternately for and against technology. They’d use whatever means it took to catch a rogue. So, it shouldn’t be a surprise that they’d call in a top computer mind to help with the search.
Searching via computer was a hell of a lot easier than the days of hunting via horseback.
But still, Alistar was surprised.
And who was this Lexi dude?
As if sensing the turmoil inside him, Basil patted his forearm. Had she had one of her visions? Maybe she was trying to soothe him.
“Shouldn’t we have gotten a report on this guy? I mean, if he’s going to be on the team, shouldn’t we know something more than his name?” Basil asked.
“First name,” Rhyse corrected.
“You’d think,” Alistar said, pulling up their group email.
There was no file waiting for them. Nothing new in their file system. They’d stopped sending paper copies in the mid-1990s.
He had an itch to call the council back and ask what the hell was going on.
With so many factions within the paranormal realm, and plenty of animosity after wars between species, it was customary to provide warning before a new ring member arrived.
“And what did he mean by arriving any minute? We always meet on neutral territory,” Basil said.
“What if this is a game? What if Mariah is playing with us?” Alistar asked, a sick feeling in his gut.
“Call the Council,” Rhyse said.
Alistar dialed the number every Stigward member knew by heart. He gave his identification code. The same soft, feminine voice as before came on the line.
“This is Rhyse van Aert. We haven’t received a file on our new team member.”
“Lexi isn’t a team member,” the woman said. “Lexi’s a helper.”
A helper?
What the hell?
“We’re going to need more than that,” Rhyse said, hands braced once more on the polished-wood surface.
The front gate buzzer sounded.
