When she turned back to refocus on what was ahead, her Lara Croft braid swung back and forth across her tight waist. The fact that she’d mated a human had been as miraculous as the fact that she’d gotten out of theirmahmen’s private quarters up in the Sanctuary where she’d been kept in suspended animation, like a Barbie collectible, instead of a living person.
“You’ll let me know if you have any problems with him,” he said.
And mostly kept the growl out of his voice.
His sister stopped and turned around. And she didn’t wait for him to come up to her—she marched to him like the pair of steps he would have taken to get to her were an impermissible delay.
“Back off, V. We don’t have any problems, and if we did, I’d handle it myself. Our mates may work together, but I don’t need my brother in my relationship.”
Meeting pale eyes that were as sharp as his own, he had an uncharacteristic urge to throw out a hug. Instead, he smiled. Honestly smiled.
“Roger that,” he murmured.
With a nod, like he’d made the only reasonable choice in Payne’s mind, she kept going, and so did he. And as they came around to the rear of the pharmacy, there were no cars in the shallow parking lot—and check it out. More neat-as-a-pin: Even the dumpster that was set by the rear door sparkled, its perfect paint job as if the stuff had been slapped on fresh during the day, no bumps or dings in the side panels, either.
The dumpsters down in Caldwell looked they had terminal acne and a case of the punching bags.
“I think I know why humans move up here,” he muttered as they approached the pharmacy’s back door. “Go figure, it’s more civilized in the sticks.”
“Do we care about this seal?” Payne asked as she pointed to the orange eye-level sticker that had been affixed on the juncture at the jamb.
“Not in the slightest. They can have a field day getting thought up about it being broken tomorrow morning. That’s not our problem.”
His sister willed both the dead bolts free, and she palmed up one of her guns as she opened the door. The whiff of laundry detergent, dryer sheets, dish soap, and shampoo was a fake meadow in the spring, and they both sneezed at the same time.
“What are we looking for?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
He walked in behind her and glanced around. Then went over to the coupon flyers that had been Scotch-Taped around the enclosed drug-dispensing area. “Two for one, the vitamins. And a ten percent off diabetic supplies.”
“This was not a professional job.” Payne leaned down over a humidifier that had lost whatever battle it had been in. “Too much displaced, too inefficient. Or they were professionals and just didn’t give a shit.”
“I vote for the latter.”
He stepped up onto the raised floor behind the counter, where the cash register and the expensive things like blood pressure cuffs, thermometers, and insulin testers were mounted on the wall. No cigarettes. Those were at the front of the store at the other register with the candy and the magazines.
The kicked-in door to the segregated drug-dispensing area had been a flimsy barricade at best, separating the rest of the store from the prescription medications by only a panel of particleboard painted with the same logo that was on the glass of the front windows. Routing around its cockeyed recline, he entered the thicket of shelves. The bottles and boxes that had been discarded by the burglars as undesirable were a debris field made up of Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, and AbbVie products; bending down, he rifled through and recognized some of the generic names, as well as some of the branded ones.
“It’s not someone looking to cook up meth.” He glanced over at the organized lineup of Sudafed and other decongestants. “The ephedrine and the pseudoephedrine weren’t touched.”
He quickly kept sifting through what was on the floor. “Xanax. Other benzos. They left behind what would be a fortune on the streets.”
“What am I looking for exactly?” his sister asked as she joined him.
“Penicillin. Tell me if you find anything like amoxicillin, ampicillin—anything that ends in ‘cillin.’ Also, sulfa drugs. Z-Paks. I think they took all of it.”
Payne threw her braid back over her shoulder. “You should have brought myhellren. He would have been—”
The creaking sound of the rear door into the store brought both their heads up. With a coordination that came from training and instinct, as well as shared DNA, they both palmed up and pointed their guns at whoever was making the colossal mistake of entering through the back way.
“Great,” V muttered. “Just when we needed some company.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Back at the underground hideout beneath the hunting cabin, Kane’s blood was the most beautiful wine Nadya had ever tasted. As its nourishment slipped over her tongue and traveled down the back of her throat, a compulsive need to take more and more made her swallow faster and faster. Even as she told herself to go slowly and be careful not to drain him, instinct took over—until her blunt nails were digging into his forearm, and her fangs were all but chewing on him, and the gnawing hunger in her got worse, instead of better.
He didn’t stop her.