CHAPTERONE
MARCUS
She's coming.
My eyes flew open as the words echoed in my head.
I sat up and threw the blanket off my legs. The room was still dim, but I could see the first watery light of dawn slipping around the edge of the blinds.
Rubbing a hand over my sternum, I leaned over and tried to take a slow, deep breath.
As always, the dreams made my chest feel tight, as though I couldn't take in enough air. Then, there was the headache that accompanied it.
I winced as the first throb hit behind my eyes. I knew Ava would have cuffed me on the back of the head for calling them dreams when, in reality, they were visions. As a powerful sorceress, she would know the difference, I suppose.
But, still, if they happened in my sleep, what else should I call them but dreams?
Mostly they were nightmares that featured the same woman. A woman who'd been trapped and terrified by Rhiannon.
I tried to take comfort that the woman was no longer in danger because Rhiannon had been imprisoned in a magical realm by a deity, the Goddess herself. But from the dreams she shared with me, I doubted that the woman knew.
Rhiannon had wrought so much pain the year before she was caught and sent elsewhere. She'd tried to destroy Macgrath, a man I consider a brother, the one who had turned me into a vampire to save me from death on the battlefield. When that didn't work, she went after his mate, Ava.
Unfortunately, she'd underestimated Ava's powers. And her connections to the Goddess.
In the eleven months since she'd been banished, Ava and Macgrath had worked to heal the damage Rhiannon had caused not only to them, but to others.
Like Caleb.
In her quest for more power, Rhiannon had used ancient magic to create ananimavore, a soul eater.
Once a normal man, Caleb now required the life force of others to live. Through Rhys, the only otheranimavorein existence, he'd learned to feed without hurting or killing humans and he'd learned to control his power.
Seeing as how Rhys had found his way to Ava just before Rhiannon's reappearance, and met his mate at Ava's shop, I had to believe that it was fated.
Rhiannon had also been the cause of a rift between Macgrath, Callum, and me. The three of us had fought side-by-side for over a thousand years, yet she managed to tear us apart with ridiculous ease.
Those wounds were beginning to heal, but I doubted it would be as quickly or as easily as the ones between Macgrath and Ava.
As the ache behind my eyes began to lessen, I turned my thoughts back toward my dream and the woman.
She'd been in the car, driving through the night.
Coming to Austin.
And, though she didn't realize it, she was coming right to me.
The knowledge was both heady and weighty.
From her nightmares, her memories really, I knew that she no longer felt safe and that she feared Rhiannon's return.
I hadn't told a soul about the dreams. They were too painful. Too intimate.
I not only saw what she did, but I felt her pain, her fear...the utter helplessness.
Also, there was the fact that she was the hacker who'd helped Rhiannon hide her tracks. The computer wizard that Callum couldn't track, no matter how hard he tried.
That was saying something, because not only did his fingers move with preternatural speed, his brain seemed to as well. There were very few hackers who could outdo Callum and he'd been more than a little pissed at his inability to track not only Rhiannon, but the hacker as well.
