Zoe's Blockade (Destiny's Trinities Book 5) (3 page)

He pulled on his coat and zipped it up over his bare chest and shoved his feet into the open tops of his boots. He didn’t bother with the laces. He wouldn’t be going far.

He dug the truck keys out of the pocket of his coat and touched Zoe’s cheek. “It’ll be fine,” he told her.

As he opened the door, righteousness filled him. This was the smart move. This would dispense with all the nonsense inside five minutes, then he could toss the idiot, talk Zoe back to sense and get on with his day. He had a report to write about the campers they’d hauled to the medical center last night. Minor frost bite—they were lucky. It was only minus ten. By January it could drop to forty below at night around here and frost bite would be the least of their concerns.

His mind already turning over the phrases he would need for the report and the information he would pass along to his captain that
wouldn’t
be in the report, Cole bounced down the steps and over to his truck.

He came to a halt, the keys swinging on the end of his fingers, as he saw the battered Mustang next to it.

Zoe and the man, Diego, were both on the verandah watching him. Zoe had pushed her feet into her boots, but wasn’t wearing a coat. She had her arms crossed over her chest for warmth.

Cole gripped the keys to stop them swinging. Slowly, deliberately, he walked around the Mustang. His circuit complete, he examined the caved-in side and the ruined paintwork.

His heart started working as if he was climbing the knees of mountains, only he was just standing there. He looked up, toward the bridge. He had seen that view thousands of times.

There were shadows among the edges of the trees that weren’t normally there.

Cole recognized the sour ache in his chest and the high singing in his mind. He remembered it from combat. The pre-action adrenaline rush. His gut was getting him ready while his mind was still trying to encompass that fighting was on the cards at all.

Slowly, he climbed back up onto the verandah.

Zoe lowered her arms, puzzled. “Cole…?”

“Back into the house,” he said, his voice low. “Both of you.”

Diego moved immediately. He understood.

Zoe frowned. “I don’t get it.” It wasn’t often her small face wore that expression.

Cole took her arm. “Come on,” he said, trying to make it sound gentle. “I need food and another gallon of coffee.”

She bit her lip and let him draw her into the house.

He locked the front door behind him. He had a feeling the lock would be useless. Anything that could do that to a car would simply throw itself against the windows and roll right in like a grenade, full of whatever fury had made it decide that Cole’s place was a good one to stake out.

All three of them returned to the kitchen silently and sat back down, except Zoe. She leaned her hip against the counter, one foot crossed over the other, her arms crossed. He recognized the defensive posture.

Diego was looking at him. “The marks, right?” he said.

“I’ve done my share of hunting,” Cole said. “A deer or even a small moose could do that sort of damage to your car, only they don’t have claws. There were claw marks all along both sides of the car…and they weren’t bear claws. I’ve seen claw marks left by bears and these were too close together. The largest cat in British Columbia is the cougar and they’re rare these days. Cougar claws wouldn’t have dug in like that. The paneling on the car was peeled back as if it was orange skin.”

Diego nodded. “They’re not natural creatures.”

“No,” Cole agreed. “I get that.” He looked at Zoe. “I really do need more coffee,” he said. “Do you mind?”

She shook her head and plucked the kettle from the range and turned to the sink. In the bright sunlight pouring in the window, her short red hair glowed and Cole’s heart shifted and warmth touched him, as it always did when he realized she was here in his life.

Then he looked at Diego. The man—the vampire, Cole reminded himself—was watching him closely.

“Start again,” he told Diego. “This time, I’ll listen.”

Zoe thought Diego might be happy to talk forever, especially as Cole just sat still, not interrupting, absorbing everything. There was a tiny furrow between Cole’s brows which said he was concentrating. It wasn’t the wholesale frown that said something had offended his sense of rightness and he was no longer listening. That deep frown had been there until he had seen the car.

It was exactly like Cole to do this. He made up his own mind. The claw marks on the Mustang had been the solid evidence he’d needed to accept everything else. Now he was just taking it on board. Processing it.

She moved quietly around the kitchen, pulling together Cole’s favorite breakfast of pancakes and sausages, grilled tomato and toast while Diego continued to talk about the Grimoré, the vampeen, the hound-like creatures who had blockaded them inside their own house, pixies, demons and elves.

The war the vampires had been spearheading for nearly three years now was news to Zoe, while the idea of demons and pixies was not. She had never seen a pixie, although she had known hunters who said they had.

It was easier for her to keep moving while she listened. It hid her nervousness and let her work it off. Eventually, she put the plate in front of Cole and glanced at Diego. “You don’t mind?”

“Why should he mind?” Cole asked. His tone was curious, rather than peremptory.

“Some vampires are uneasy, watching humans eat,” Diego replied. “I live with a human and an elf, who both eat. It doesn’t bother me at all.”

Cole glanced at Zoe. She mentally sighed. They were going to have to have a long talk, later. She had explaining of her own to do.

“The human and the elf…they are your trinity?” she asked Diego.

Diego smiled and it was a startling expression, for it was soft and warm. Even the expression in his eyes gentled. “I sometimes forget that’s why we met, but yes. We were the third trinity to form.”

Cole paused, the first forkful of pancake not quite reaching his mouth.

Diego gave a self-conscious laugh and used both hands to ruffle his shaggy hair and push it back out of the way. “It would be better if Seaveth was here to explain things. She makes it sound like a better proposition than I can. She sees the big picture. Me, I just look for the next vampeen I can kill.”

Cole swallowed. Then he ate the pancake, concentrating on it.

Zoe bit her lip. Diego didn’t like talking about slippery emotions any more than Cole did, apparently. Yet the rich feeling that had shown on his face just then, when he had thought of his two…his trinity, had been more convincing than a thousand words, or the big picture that Seaveth might have offered.

“There’s one thing that doesn’t make sense,” Cole said. “You keep talking about trios and threes and trinities, as if it’s the magic number. Only, there are two of us in the house. That’s it. Why are these…vampeen…why are they surrounding the house if there’s just two? The trinity can’t form until the third is here. That’s what you said, right?”

It was Diego’s turn to frown.

The sound of a cell phone ringing was unexpected and Zoe jumped. It wasn’t her phone or Cole’s.

Diego dug into his jacket and pulled out a phone and glanced at the screen. “It’s Seaveth,” he said, glanced at them both. “I have to take this.” He got up and strode out of the kitchen into the front hall, the phone to his ear. “Beth, hi…yeah, I know....yeah, British Columbia….”

Cole stopped eating as soon as Diego disappeared. He looked at her. His hazel eyes were steady.

“It’s not you I lied to specifically,” she said. “Hunters don’t talk about their lives to anyone. I’m one of the rare ones who managed to get out of the business and live a normal life. I thought I had left all of it behind in the States.”

Cole considered her. “I can understand not talking about it,” he said slowly. “But Zoe, not even to me?”

She pressed her fingers together. Twined them. “I wanted to be normal. I just wanted to be your wife and have a normal life. I thought that, if I told you, you…..” She couldn’t make herself say it.

“You thought I wouldn’t love you anymore.” He said it calmly.

Zoe nodded. Her heart was throwing itself against her chest. Hurting. Cole was studying her in the deliberate way he had.

“You’re not the person I thought I loved,” he said, his voice low.

Tears burned in her eyes and she blinked. “I am that same person,” she said, her voice hoarse. “There’s just more to me than you realized, that’s all.”

Cole sat back, the chair creaking with his weight. He was still shirtless and his tanned flesh was smooth and as Zoe knew personally, soft to the touch. The muscles beneath were not, however. He was a physical man and the width of his shoulders and back and the trim waist showed that. It made her a little crazy to look at him in the low-slung pajama pants, even while they were talking about such horrible things.

He was stroking his thumb over a crease in his pajamas, concentrating on it. “I guess…we both have pasts, don’t we? I thought it was just me with all the baggage and you managed to encompass
my
history. Maybe I need to do the same thing with you.”

Hope stirred. Zoe stayed silent, waiting, as Cole sorted it out.

* * * * *

As he clutched the phone and listened, Diego rubbed at the back of his neck, digging the fingers in. It wasn’t tight back there, yet stress could make a vampire
think
their muscles were tightening up, ghostly reminders of when they had been human.

“There’s a reason the trinity formed where it did,” Beth said, her voice choppy. She was somewhere in Illinois, her call relayed back to the New York office, where Zack and Lindal were, then on to Diego. People were patching in every few seconds, as Lindal sent out the number. All of them were trinity people, so Diego wasn’t self-conscious about it. He knew and trusted every single one of them, now he had gone through his own bonding and understood how powerful it was.

“The trinity formed in Erie because there were thousands of vampeen building in the forests there,” Beth continued. “This second wave of trinities seem to form where they’re most needed. From what you are saying, Diego, it appears your trinity is needed in northern Canada.”

“Except it’s not a trinity,” he said flatly. “That’s what I don’t get. The vampeen are here. Their hounds are here. There’s probably a bunch of Grimoré handing out orders somewhere nearby, too. There always is. With this many, I would have said they were targeting the town. Revelstoke.”

“Except they’re not,” Blake said. “They’re focusing on a house outside town that doesn’t have a complete, unbonded trinity in it. There are two and they’re already bonded in the human way. I don’t understand it either.”

“The force that drives the bondings always knows what it is doing,” Beth said serenely.

“Hounds,” someone who sounded a lot like Alexander said. “What next? Vampeen cats?”

“They wouldn’t use cats,” another voice said.

From the flat serious tone, Diego thought it might be the demon from the Pennsylvania trinity.
Demon
. Aithan corrected Diego every time he said the word. Incubi were demi-demons in Diego’s mind. He had killed more than his share of the bastards. Yet Aithan
was
different. In the inner recesses of his mind, Diego acknowledged that Aithan seemed, well, almost human. Except he seemed to have lost his sense of humor somewhere in the last few centuries.

“Cats do not know how to obey their masters,” Aithan added now. “Dogs are pack animals, bred to obey their alpha and would be useful to the vampeen.”

There was a small silence as everyone adjusted to Aithan’s straight answer in response to Alexander’s joke.

That was when the photo jumped off the mantelshelf.

The fireplace was a huge, raw stone thing, typical of log cabins and scaled to match the size of the room. The stone mantelshelf was built into the rock wall that climbed all the way to the ceiling, twelve feet above. The center of the ceiling was even higher, where the roof peaked. More massive tree trunks were running across the space as exposed trusses. The window at the end of the room was a huge three piece aperture, the triangle-shaped pane at the top matching the slope of the roof. The view beyond of snow-covered mountains and wide blue sky made the window a perfect frame.

The room was warm, comfortable and overstuffed and included dozens of pictures in frames sitting on the mantelshelf along with knickknacks, trophies and more. It was incredibly homey and the sense of permanence and belonging were not lost on Diego. He’d just been too busy with the phone call and sorting out who was talking to let it register more than skin deep.

Places like this had once made him uneasy, filling him with an almost violent resentment that such permanence and sense of family could never be his. Now, though, he had Blake and Sera and that made all the difference in the world.

He lowered the phone, looking at the picture laying face-down on the rug in front of the unlit fireplace.

There were no air currents in the room. There was nothing that could possibly make a picture leap off a perfectly stable shelf like that.

Even with the phone lowered, he could hear Wyatt talking about gatherings and concentrations, his voice emerging from the phone in wisps. Wyatt was a damn good hunter and tended to think in hunting terms even when dealing with the Grimoré. Diego stopped listening. There were more than enough experts on everything listening in on the call.

Instead, he went over to the photo and picked it up. He flipped it over in his hand and looked at it.

Understanding flared in him. He lifted the phone back up to his face. “Gotta go.”

He hung up, cutting the squawks and demands for explanations off short.

* * * * *

Diego—the vampire, Cole deliberately reminded himself—walked back into the kitchen. It was getting easier to think and speak the word without wanting to laugh at himself. The claw marks on the car were indisputable. He kept coming back to that over and over.
Something
had battered the car almost to pieces and it wasn’t a bear or a cat. Every time the conversation became too surreal, he reminded himself of the car.