It had to be some kind of magic. The gravity in Jared’s command, its intensity and its weight, was more absolute than anything I’d felt from him before. Even when he’d bitten me outside The Rain, his words hadn’t held this much authority. Was that because he’d given me his blood instead of taking mine? Or did it have something to do with the compound accepting him as its master?

I might have asked if he hadn’t been a dozen steps in front of me, leading the way down to wherever his residence was located. Nora walked beside him exuding her own power and confidence. In fact, she appeared to be more composed than Blake.

I glanced at the more dominant werewolf beside me. His eyes were almost full gold and his movements were… stuttered was the best description I could come up with. The presence of an Aged vampire, the violence in the past half hour, his instinct to protect Nora—all of it had him fighting to remain human.

Almost like the mountainside.

Warmth expanded in my chest before it rollercoastered down to my stomach. I bit my lower lip, attempting to erase that deep, electric feeling which had become more common over the weeks and months I’d known him. My presence complicated this situation.

REDACTED FOR MINI SPOILER

I bit my lower lip harder.

Needing a distraction, I glanced back to see if Christian still followed behind us. He was there, but he didn’t meet my eyes. Overall, he just seemed tired. The fight with Arcuro had only been a few days ago. We both needed more time to recover.

Guilt tried to weave its way between my ribs. I didn’t let it take over. This was a moment when I needed to be strong. Proximity to me tended to put Christian into dangerous situations, but I hadn’t ordered him to stay at The Rain for so long. I hadn’t told him to chase after Nora or rush into the compound behind Blake’s wolves.

But I had asked him to help me free Deagan. That was my fault. He had a guilt-driven need to protect me, and I’d leveraged that to… Actually, he’d told me no. Melissa was the one who’d changed his mind.

I jarred to a stop on the next step down. I’d been lost in my thoughts, not paying attention to Jared and Nora until I’d almost crashed into them.

Jared spoke to Jacob and another vampire I didn’t recognize. I missed the conversation’s beginning, but picked up the ending where Jared ordered them to “keep vigil.”

I snorted. When he looked my way, I shrugged and smiled. Then added on a wince. So much movement was not good for my still-healing face.

Without one flicker of an expression, Jared entered the dark room to the left.

No, the dark corridor. The curtain of black shadows blinded me.

I stopped two steps inside, said, “I can’t see.”

“I can.” I jumped when Blake placed a hand on my lower back, partly because I hadn’t known he was so close and also because his touch was dangerous. It made me want his arm around my waist, pulling me closer.

Behind us, a light cut through the dark—Christian’s phone. I’d left mine at home. Blake and Nora’s would have vanished when they shifted, and if Jared had one, he obviously wasn’t sharing.

Blake’s glower settled the butterflies in my stomach. Enduring the ache throbbing through my jaw, I smiled.

That made Blake turn his glower on me. It was softer, though, and he didn’t try to stop me when I moved to stand beside Christian. He even stepped aside to let us pass, replacing Christian as the tail end of our little procession.

“Thanks,” I said to Christian.

“Sure.” We bumped shoulders as we walked. His light didn’t brighten the whole corridor, but it was enough to keep us from running into anything, and it announced when the surface beneath our shoes changed from stone to metal grating.

I frowned at that transition then looked ahead when a deep, echo-y clank rumbled around us. Jared had turned the handle on a heavy-looking door and pulled it open. He and Nora entered. Christian and I followed then—

My brain stuttered as it processed the gaping chamber in front of us. “This is a missile silo.”

I didn’t realize I said those words out loud until Nora and Jared both looked back at me.

“Yes,” Nora said, sounding as if she was explaining something simple to a child. “That’s why the vampires built the compound here.”

I ignored the lofty arch to her eyebrows. “Yeah. I just thought that…” Actually, I’d never really thought about all the stone and rock that surrounded us in the compound. Every time I’d ended up down there, my focus had been on other things. Things like surviving. “Never mind. I just didn’t know what a missile silo looked like.”

“Typically,” Jared said, “there is enough room for a missile.”

Blake snorted behind us, and Christian’s mouth lifted at the edges.

My eyes narrowed. Had Jared just made a joke? Or was he emulating Nora’s condescension? I decided it was the former.

Channeling my inner robot, I wiped every trace of emotion from my face. Then, in an excellent impersonation of both Jared and a blank wall, I said, “Noted.”

Christian laughed out loud this time, a small grin erased all signs of Nora’s condescension, and was that a hint of annoyance in Jared’s eyes? Either way, I added a mental checkmark to the I’m-funnier-than-you column of a score sheet.

Jared continued on, following the catwalk along the wall. We were about midway down in the silo—or up depending on your perspective. Christian turned off the light on his phone. We could see now thanks to the soft glow of small, rectangular panels attached at intervals to the walls. The only interesting thing they illuminated was the ground far below us. Old equipment cluttered the area, probably discarded there by either the US military or the vampires when they took over.

“Why is the compound in the tunnels and chambers when you have this?” I asked. Dynamiting through the earth and stone was a hell of a lot more difficult than building rooms into the actual silo.

“We did,”  Jared responded. “But many vampires did not trust the silo would remain forgotten by humans. Arcuro ordered the compound built. He used it as a way to punish individuals who disappointed him.”

Disappointed him. Yeah, it had never been a good idea to get on Arcuro’s bad side.

The catwalk ended at another heavy metal door. Jared opened it with all the strength it would take to move a cardboard box, and we entered another corridor. Unlike the previous one, the glow from the wall lights pushed away the darkness. It also looked more silo-like with a tiled, once-white floor, gray walls, and overhead, thick power conduits which snaked along the ceiling.

We passed through one more door before we reached our destination, a large room that had most likely been an office or command center. Now, it looked like some weird personal museum.

I didn’t know what to make of it. Didn’t know what to make of Jared. Most of the room’s consoles and equipment had been stripped away, leaving behind gouges and scrapes on the laminate floor and holes with hopefully not live wires in the wall. The only relic that remained was a set of off-centered computer monitors. They were on, rotating through grainy views of the land above us. The sun had been replaced by a hazy half moon. Just enough light penetrated the thin clouds for me to just make out the decoy house a surprisingly far distance away.

My attention didn’t linger on the monitors, though. Jared had far more interesting things displayed on an eclectic collection of surfaces. Like the square side table that held a small metal device screwed into a block of wood—a telegraph machine maybe—and an extremely old typewriter perched in the center of a bar-height table.

My gaze swept across other items—a huge, antique radio, a record player with a massive and slightly dented horn, a antique rifle, its wood worn smooth from actual use. 

“You fight in the Civil War?” It was old enough. He was old enough.

“In a way,” he replied then motioned to a cluster of leather chairs. “Sit.”