With no other ideas, I forced myself to reach out with my shadows. They slipped under the doors of each room, searching and seeking out the vampire I needed. Until finally, they found him.
In a room four doors down, Gavin sat on the edge of his bed naked, face fucking a female I didn’t know or care to. Grimacing, I called my other shadows back to me and stalked down the hallway until I reached Gavin’s room.
If Tate had been there, he’d tell me to wait. Be polite. Knock on the door. Wait for him to finish. But I was done being polite. Done waiting for these fuckers to finally get their hands on Jack and then it would be too late.
Shadows grew behind me, blotting out the lights lining the ceiling of the hallway. I gathered them to me and, with a push, I shoved them at the door.
The wood, though thick, stood no chance against the force of my shadows. It slammed the door open, knocking it off its hinges and filling the room with a darkness that was darker than dark. The kind of dark that you couldn’t even see your hand in front of your face and there was no adjusting your eyes to it. Except for me.
The woman screamed.
Gavin shouted.
For a moment, I watched them both scramble in the dark. The female crab-walked backward as if the shadows were comingfrom Gavin himself until she bumped into my calves just outside of the darkness.
Head tilted back, her eyes moved up my body and then widened when they landed on me.
“Leave,” I ordered, only giving her a cursory glance before focusing back on the shadows corralling my prey on the bed.
Gavin flinched at my voice, then started to bob his head around as if he could see through the dark to me. “Kyren? Is that you? What’s with all the shadows?”
Step by step, I walked into the dark, the shadows parting around me like water, caressing and wrapping around my body where they belonged until I reached the end of the bed. I sent the shadows to the side so that he could see me, but not much else.
“Do you know a Marianne?” I asked, not bothering to beat around the bush.
Gavin blinked rapidly and swallowed. “Marianne?” he stuttered. “No, I don’t know any Marianne.” He shook his head back and forth so aggressively, I wouldn’t have been surprised if it had fallen right off.
“Are you sure?” I put one foot up on the end of the bed, leaning on my knee with my elbow, my shadows creeping back in around him. “Because she knows you. At least, that’s what she said before I ripped her limb from limb.”
Gavin’s whole body shook, his chin wobbling before he swallowed. A human habit he was too young to have gotten rid of yet. “Oh, that Marianne. Yeah, I know her.”
“She’s part of the little group you wanted me to join, is she not?”
“Uh…” he began.
I allowed my shadows to send tendrils toward his naked body, in case he decided that he wanted to lie to me again. Satisfaction filled me every time he flinched away from them as if they were bugs crawling up his body.
“Yes, yes, okay.” he practically screeched, trying to push the shadows off of him. “She’s part of our group. Please stop.”
“Why?” My lips twitched at his fear. “I haven’t finished asking all my questions yet.”
Hissing, Gavin flashed his fangs at me. “I don’t answer to you.” Without warning, he flew at me.
My shadows were faster. With barely any effort at all they pinned him to the bed, one wrapped around each limb and one around his neck.
Sighing, I stepped onto the bed and knelt above him.
“Get the fuck away from me. I don’t fuck guys.”
My nose crinkled up in disgust. “I have no interest in your body or anything else of yours. All I want are answers.”
His muscles bulged in his arms where he tried to resist the strength of my shadows. I had no reason to fear he’d be able to break loose. I had more than a hundred years on him, and he was nothing more than a baby vampire with visions of grandeur.
“Fine, fuck!” he spat, his chest heaving though I knew he had no need to breathe. “What do you want to know?”
“Did you attack Jack a few weeks ago?”
“No?” Gavin’s brow furrowed, then he let out a hard laugh. Or tried to with the shadow squeezing his throat. “Someone got a piece of that Durand bitch? Did they kill her?”
