Pure Blood_ A Nocturne City Novel - Caitlin Kittredge [76]
But all I really saw was Joshua. He was older, lines around his eyes and mouth giving him the dignity he’d lacked fifteen years ago. Same burning dark eyes, same thin-lipped cruelty to his expression. His shaggy brown-blond hair had grown into a ponytail neatly clipped at the back of his neck with a silver band. He wore Armani instead of biker leathers, but it was him, surely as I was Luna Joanne Wilder.
“Luna!” he exclaimed. “Seven hells, life sure is funny, isn’t it?” He took a step toward me and I raised my gun directly between his eyes.
“Don’t take another fucking step.” My human brain may have been shocked beyond cognition, but the were knew his smell.
Joshua raised both palms in mock alarm. “Whoa there, girl. Friends. We’re not doing anything wrong here.”
Rage cut through the shock and the rush of emotions from seeing my de facto pack leader again after years of nightmares and nameless empty places in my heart. The son of a bitch was patronizing me. “Get your hands behind your head,” I snapped. “All of you!” I added when one of the security men on the leather sofas went for his gun.
Joshua waved a hand. “Don’t worry, boys. She’s all bark and no bite.” Behind him, the SWAT helicopter came in for a bouncy landing on the O’Hallroans’ helipad. About freaking time.
I turned to Valerie. “You okay?”
“I’m fine. Why wouldn’t I be?” she said, turning her head slowly to give me a puzzled look. Her eyes were glazed and blank, like someone had taken an eraser to her features.
I swung the gun back to Joshua. “What did you do to her?” It had to be another compulsion—Valerie’s blank dreamy-eyed stare wasn’t induced by anything human.
“Me? Nothing,” Joshua said. “And I resent the implication.”
I blinked. The Joshua I’d met at a bonfire in San Romita had struggled with anything over two syllables.
“You know, Luna, I never expected to meet you again,” he said, walking toward me again. I caught his eyes and stared, marveling at how they burned with a yellow spark even when he was human. “And now that I have, I’m a little disappointed—actually, a lot disappointed. The girl I knew would never join the pigs, much less burst in and wave a gun at her proper mate.”
He stopped a few feet from me, never breaking eye contact. My limbs went heavy and I felt as if my own thoughts were being pushed under to accommodate what Joshua wanted me to think. He was disgusted, and that made me terribly upset. I had to fix this, had to show him I was worthy…
The SWAT team flooded into the room, yelling and wrestling security force thugs to the floor. I barely noticed them, locked as I was in Joshua’s eyes.
“There’s a good girl,” he said, in the same way you’d praise a toy poodle. “Now maybe we can finish what we started oh-so-many years ago.” He reached for me, and I caught the edge of the rampant snake tattoo on his right wrist. Like a cord had been snapped, Joshua’s will was replaced by the flood of memories of his attack, the chest-crushing feeling of panic and trauma.
He had tried to pull a dominate. On me. And seven hells, it had almost worked. I aimed just to the left of Joshua’s ear and put a bullet into the pine paneling behind his head. The SWAT team shouted and covered, aiming their weapons at us. The handcuffed goons couldn’t do much except glare.
I met Joshua’s eyes again, my fury burning his dominate out of existence. “The next one is a sucking chest wound,” I said.
He smiled again, trying to laugh it off, but his jaw twitched with rage. I gestured tiredly to a SWAT officer, suddenly feeling the weight of my vest and gun and my bones. “Get him out of my sight.”
“Some things never change,” Joshua said as he was handcuffed and hauled away. “Still an uppity little bitch.”
I sank onto a leather footstool with the feet of a hoofed dead animal, and put my face in my hands. Joshua. I had hoped for so long he was dead, or in prison, or somewhere I’d never have to see him again. Well, a hope and