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wasn’t
like any encounter she’d ever had with a man before. Skin-to-skin contact
usually brought on a man-pocalypse. What is happening to me?
    “I’ll just be in the next room. Get some rest,” he said. He
dimmed the room lights and left, drawing the door not quite closed behind
himself.
    No, don’t go , Lily thought sadly. I need you here. She lay for a long time in the silence, trying to slow her breathing. She felt
strange. She swore she could feel every cell in her body, right down to the
blood cells moving through her veins. She could still smell him on her hands
and her lips tingled oddly. She brought her hands to her face on the pillow,
touching her mouth to see if it felt any different. She felt…marked. It was a
long time before she slept.
     
    Darek rounded on Bane the second he stepped through the door
to the adjoining room.
    “For fuck’s sake, Bane,” he growled, his eyes flashing red.
“You have her scent all over you.”
    Bane raised an eyebrow, studying his friend. He was used to
Darek’s preference for shooting first and asking questions later. When Bane
spoke, he did so in careful, measured tones. “Perhaps so,” he said quietly. “I
take it you object?”
    Darek snarled, his hands clenching into fists. “To you
fucking around with a target? You’re damn right I object!” He stormed across
the room, red light flickering over and through his skin in lightning-like
flashes, signaling that a shift was imminent.
    Bane’s mouth twitched in spite of his friend’s ire.
“Shifting in here would be…ill-advised. If you want to tear me limb from limb,
let’s at least adjourn to the balcony.”
    Usually, humor calmed Darek. Usually. So it surprised Bane
when his friend grabbed him by the front of the shirt, lengthening talons
piercing the fabric and cutting his chest.
    “All right,” Darek grated, his eyes glowing bright red now.
    A cold anger spread in Bane’s gut and he clenched Darek’s
wrists in his hands. “We can do this if you want, but it’s not going to change
the way you feel about her.”
    Darek stopped mid-snarl, shock registering on his features.
“Is that what you think?” he asked in a low, dangerous voice.
    Bane regarded him with narrowed eyes, gauging his chances of
being hurled through the glass door and off the balcony. “I think,” he began.
He paused, inhaling deeply. “I think that you’re so bloody tired of losing
people you care about that when you feel something—anything—you paint it over
with rage.” Darek’s grip loosened, the red lightning in his eyes fading. “And I
think you owe me a shirt.”
    The last vestiges of red left Darek’s eyes as he let go of
Bane, his expression a mixture of anger and sorrow. “Fuck you, Sigmund.” He
took a step back, clenching and unclenching his fists. “At least I’m not the
one getting suckered by one of those bitches.” Bane raised an eyebrow but said
nothing in reply. “I need to look at the sky for a while,” Darek growled. He
shoved his now-human hands in his pockets and walked toward the glass door to
the balcony.
    Those bitches , Bane thought, would be the idani .
    Bane had been working with Darek for more than a decade.
Like everyone, he had his issues, but he was a good partner. Loyal. Raised in
war-torn Britain in the fifteenth century, Darek was a skilled warrior. He
preferred being in the thick of battle to watching it from a strategist’s post.
Bane was a superb fighter, but he preferred not to fight until he’d analyzed a
problem from every possible angle. He supposed that made sense. After all, he’d
spent his fledgling years watching people die of plague in the once-thriving
city of London. Disease wasn’t something you could tear apart with your bare
hands.
    The glass door rattled in its frame as Darek shoved it open,
stepping out onto the balcony. Bane let him go. If the night sky would bring
Darek some solace, let it be. Bane needed to think. And he really needed
a cold shower. He