Taking Back Sunday Read Free Page A

latest photograph was a recent acquisition. Outside of the photographs he’d been collecting, Cyrus hadn’t laid eyes on the target for almost ten years.
    Cyrus had hardly finished his drink when Angel strode up behind him and shoved a brunette into his face. With his arm around her friend, Angel winked and told him that their dates didn’t intend on spending the night at the bar. All his thinking of the Incarnate had given rise to a dangerous need. An angry erection tugged at his jeans, and it was all he could do to stop from ripping Angel’s offering apart right there at the bar.
    The girl ran her hand up his thigh, looking up at him through heavy lashes. Her hand found his bulge, and she licked the lips of her cat-like grin. She leaned into him, her breasts spilling from her cleavage, and placed her lips to his ear.
    “You hungry?” she purred.
    The brunette’s name was Peaches. It was a fucking joke, but Cyrus didn’t care.
    In her friend’s apartment hours later, she laid her head on his sweaty chest and fingered the hair over his heart. An hour of pounding into Peaches’ soft, velvet flesh had done nothing to soothe him. A ball gathered in his chest wound so tight he could burst.
    He reached for the photograph in his jacket and stared at it over the mess of damp tresses on his chest. The Incarnate just over a year ago was nothing like the girl he’d left behind at the compound.
    When Bernadette put out the first contract on the Incarnate over a decade earlier, every preternatural sect jumped at the proposition. The Alaska pack won out because of Cyrus. He was a storied tracker, and his involvement secured the deal. At the time, Bernadette was the most powerful witch in the country. Later, with the Incarnate at her behest, Bernadette rose as a dictator over the preternatural realm.
    Although the witch had never explained why she didn’t acquire possession herself, she put the fear of God in the wolves. They kept reminding each other that they were just scooping up, transporting, and dropping off a kid, but doubts lingered and they’d been ready for any fallout. The Incarnate’s power hadn’t been checked. Bernadette assured them that the clock was ticking to some end that they wouldn’t be looking forward to.
    What the werewolf captors encountered in Louisiana was a deceptively average fourteen-year-old girl. The Incarnate rolled her eyes sarcastically and smacked her tongue liberally. When she smiled, her eyes sparkled with naiveté. No battery of unassailable fires of mystical energy battered them when they approached her. No terror-stricken banshee wails pierced their eardrums when she spoke. The greatest danger she seemed to pose came from her off-key singing in the backseat as she rode with them during her abduction.
    It was in Albuquerque when Cyrus first laid eyes on the target of their mission. He’d waited at the first spot along the delivery route for Angel and Stephen to bring her to him. Nothing prepared him for what he saw or felt when she arrived. The reaction had been instantaneous. She was a magnet for all the negativity in Cyrus’ world. All the hate. All the anger. All the spite. All the fury. It pointed at her . That girl. That child. Blackness closed in around them. Inspired to kill her, Cyrus fumed at the instant he first saw her. Meanwhile, she sat unbothered, smacking her bubblegum. Totally ignorant of him. It did nothing but fuel his rage.
    But he couldn’t just leave her. The fire that she ignited consumed him. Dizzy with the cataclysm she inspired in him, Cyrus sought Bernadette’s counsel. During that conversation, the witch made him an offer, stay on as the head of her security team, and she would help him manage the effects the girl had on him. So he did. For three years, Cyrus oversaw the daily on-site operations at the estate. Always working in the shadows, Cyrus and the guards were veritable ghosts on the property. Months would go by, and he wouldn’t even see the girl.