It was a lie, of course. He had nothing to do but wait around, like everyone else, to find out if the vampire female died. Or rather… to see how long it took her to die.
As he passed the fire pit, there was a flare of warmth and a brief waft of woodsmoke, and then he was on the far side. The rest of the clan were out doing their nightly things, living their lives, passing among the humans if they wanted to. The dens here were one among several places for his kin to live, and with that hotel being built across the valley and the threat it had created, he wasn’t surprised things were so quiet.
It was a blessing, actually. The good thing about wolves was they were pack animals. The bad thing about wolves was they were pack animals. Strangers, even if they were invited into the territory, tended to make people uneasy.
Especially if the Gray Wolf was on the premises.
Ducking into the entry of his cave, he willed the torches mounted on the stone walls to flare. As light licked across the narrow, uneven passageway, he followed the turns out of habit, his mind back at the garage’s underground hideout.
“How does someone see the dead?” he muttered. “What, you justwalk into a place and they’re standing there with a Hello, My Name Is on? Theresa-fucking-Caputo of the bloodsuckers. Goddamn.”
When the belly of the cave unfurled itself, he stopped and looked around. The bed was nothing more than a cantilevered platform covered with furs, and his trunks and supplies were right where he’d left them. In the back, the natural spring, which was heated through some geological mystery, burbled along as usual. The fire pit was cold, the ashes from when he’d been there the day before last.
Nothing out of place. So why did he think it had been redecorated?
That fucking vampire really needed to get out of his head.
Callum undressed quickly. He always kept changes of clothes on the mountain, in case he needed them, but he didn’t think of this cave as his home.
He’d used the garage hideout as a fuck palace and munitions dump.
The hunting cabin was his I’m-trying-to-be-classy place.
And he had a bog-standard, nearly human, basement apartment with a TV and Internet access for when he needed to connect with the outside world he really couldn’t be more than an observer of.
Because, hello, to himAn American Werewolf in Londonwas a documentary, not fiction.
It would be nice to have a proper home.
Before he got into the spring, he took a couple of lengths of wood, set them in the fire circle, and willed them to light. As cheerful orange and yellow flames set up shop on their source of spruce-sustenance, and the filaments of smoke rose up and dispersed into the cracks in the rock ceiling, he felt like he wanted to scream.
So he went to the water.
Lowering himself into the pool, he found the weightlessness soothing, and he pulled himself around to his favorite spot, the smooth contours of the naturally sheared stone like a seat honed just for his body. Letting his head fall back, he watched the play of light.
Thatfuckingvampire—
Sure as if he had called the very male into existence, a figure that resembledthe one he couldn’t get out of his mind for too many reasons stepped out of the passageway and into the cave proper.
Callum lifted his head. “Is she dead then?”
They were going to have a tiger by the tail if anything happened to that female.
Whenit happened, that was.
“No.”
As the male stared across the fire, Callum became very aware that he was naked in the spring. “So what are you doing here.”
When there was no answer from the guy, he tightened his own lips. “That was a bloody cruel thing to say, you know. Back at the hunting cabin.”
“I know. That’s why I came.”
There was another pause, and then the vampire crossed his arms over his chest. As his jaw worked like he was trying to chew his own molars to stubs, Callum felt the resolve to hate the bastard ease up a little.
“What the hell is your name, vampire.”
“Apex.”