Zoe's Blockade (Destiny's Trinities Book 5) Read online

  As she was fitting the lid to the pot, she heard the clatter of a car engine approaching the house. It was a very sick car, from the sound of it. Someone on the Trans-Canada highway had obviously gotten into mechanical trouble and had pulled into the house for help. It was a dumb move. They were only five miles away from Revelstoke here. The car could have made it to the town just as easily as negotiating the rutted road from the highway. Although Zoe had learned that city-based tourists weren’t used to thinking those ways.

  With a silent sigh, she moved through the house to the front door, shoved her snow boots and heavy parka on, then stepped out onto the verandah. The freezing air washed over her.

  The first sight of the car made her heart give a little flutter of unease. It was a late model Mustang. The windshield had been busted in and there were heavy dents in the hood. Had he hit a deer? Deer would do that sort of damage on a low car.

  The Mustang pulled up next to Cole’s truck and the driver got out. Dark hair, olive skin, eyes that looked as though they could see everything.

  Zoe shivered and pulled her jacket in around her, even though it was only minus ten and the sun was warm on her face.

  The man looked up at her. “Hello.”

  He was wearing a light jacket and black runners. He would get maybe half a mile cross-country in those and even less far at night when the temperature dropped. What was he thinking?

  “Hi,” Zoe replied. “Did you hit a deer?”

  He shook his head. “I came to see you. May I come up and speak to you?”

  Zoe’s heart pattered a little faster. “I don’t know you.”

  “I know. I’m quite harmless,” he said. “I’ve come a long way, too.”

  Her instincts were against the idea of talking to him. She hesitated.

  He was looking at the peaks behind the house. “Is there a way to get to Revelstoke that doesn’t use the bridge?” he asked.

  “Sure. There’s a trail that goes over the shoulder of the mountain and into town, only it’s impassable at this time of year.”

  “No other way?”

  “Not unless you can fly. We just use the truck.”

  He glanced back down the long drive toward the tree line and the bridge. “That’s what I was afraid of,” he said quietly, almost to himself. He climbed the steps up to the verandah and came toward her. “I’m going to have to dump this on you. We don’t have time.”

  “Dump what?”

  Up close, Zoe could see his unshaved chin, dark with growth, and his even darker eyes. He had moved in a way that spoke of reined-in and controlled strength, well beyond the capabilities of a man of his build.

  She had seen that sort of control before. Startled, she studied him anew, looking for more signs. The stubble was not right. It was a human thing.

  His eyes narrowed. “Perhaps I don’t have to dump as much as I thought,” he said quietly.

  Zoe drew in a deep breath and glanced at the front door, which was still half open. “You’d better come inside,” she said. “Keep your voice down. I don’t want you to wake my husband.”

  His brow lifted. “There’s just the two of you here?” he asked sharply.

  “We’re only five miles from town. It’s not that isolated here.”

  His jaw rippled, as if he could say more yet chose not to. “Inside would be better,” he said, instead.

  Zoe led him inside and shut the door. She shucked off her coat and boots and took him back into the kitchen. The coffee would be nearly ready. “Coffee?” she asked him, testing.

  “Thanks. I just had one,” he replied.

  She waved toward the kitchen table and pulled out the stool at the end of the counter and rested her hips on it, so her feet were on the floor.

  He considered her again. “I said I was harmless.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “You have your feet on the floor, on a chair high enough that you can stand quickly. You put yourself right next to the knife block there, where all the blades are.”

  Her breath caught. “What are you?” she demanded.

  “I think you know,” he said quietly and scratched at his chin, “despite this.”

  Zoe swallowed. “Vampire….” she breathed.

  “You’re a hunter, which will save me hours of conversation, which we don’t have time for.”

  “Ex-hunter. Why don’t we have time?”

  “How long have you been out of the game?” he asked sharply, as if it was important.

  “Years. Since I left the States.”

  “That would explain why you didn’t notice the build-up on your doorstep.” He nodded toward the big windows. “You’re surrounded. There are creatures out there who have no intention of letting you leave this place. When it’s dark, they will come for you.”

  Zoe’s breath squeezed out of her. “You’re joking,” she said. Yet she knew in her bones he wasn’t. Now he had spoken of it, she could feel the darkness out there, all around the house except for where the mountain barrier sat behind them.

  “Joking about what?” Cole said from the door and rubbed his hand through his tousled blond hair. He was wearing pajama bottoms and nothing else. Zoe was only thankful he’d stopped long enough to put pants on.

  * * * * *

  Cole stared at the Latino man, wondering if he was still dreaming. The words coming out of the man’s mouth were comprehensible yet the meaning was too ridiculous to consider seriously. As the man kept talking, Cole got impatient. He put the coffee mug down with a thump.

  “Diego,” he said. “That’s what you said your name was, right?”

  “Diego Savage,” the man said. “I know this all sounds fantastic. You’ll find out very quickly that I’m not exaggerating. I’m not lying at all. This really is going to happen to you.” He glanced out the window again. “I hope sooner, rather than later.”

  “This bonding thing you keep talking about?” Cole asked. “We’re supposed to be fighters in some supernatural army?”

  “Cole…” Zoe said softly. She was warning him in her gentle way to keep a civil tongue in his head.

  He sighed and tried again. “I don’t believe in monsters, Mr. Savage.”

  “Cole,” Zoe said, more sharply.

  He looked up at her. She was standing at the corner of the counter and she was tense. “I believe him,” she said quietly.

  Cole laughed. “You don’t even like horror movies!”

  “I don’t,” she said calmly, “because I think they’re silly, not because I don’t believe in monsters.”

  Cole stared at her, trying to get his mind around the fact that his wife, who was the calmest and sanest person he had ever met, was professing to believe all this mystical nonsense.

  “Diego,” she said softly. “Perhaps, just once, would you mind showing your fangs?”

  Diego hung his head for a moment. “In the name of saving time, sure.” He lifted his top lip in a snarl.

  Cole stared as two long, pointed teeth descended from the gum line above Diego’s normal teeth. He watched them descend. They weren’t a prosthetic, or fake things worn over the other teeth. They grew, right as he watched them.

  He swallowed.

  The fangs withdrew as smoothly as they had extended and Diego stopped snarling.

  “Vampires don’t like to show their fangs,” Zoe said. “For them, it’s a bit like being naked, all mixed up with sex and procreation.”

  Cole stared at her, amazed that Zoe was speaking these words with the same calm gentleness she used to speak of grocery lists and canning produce for the cold cellar. “How do you know that?” he asked, the question only occurring to him after his amazement faded.

  “Remember I told you I was a bounty hunter when I lived in the States?” she asked.

  He nodded. “Yeah. Bail enforcement agent. You worked with bail bondsmen in California.”

  She shook her head. “I was a hunter, only I didn’t hunt human fugitives.”

  Cole turned to look a
t the man, the thing, called Diego. It shook its head. “Vampires haven’t been on the hunting lists for centuries,” Diego said shortly. “We’re hunters ourselves, now. It suits our natural talents.”

  “You’re…a monster,” Cole said slowly.

  “The real monsters are out there,” Diego said, nodding toward the windows. “Which is why I need you to move past all your shock and indignation about your wife hiding her real past. Accept that vampires are real. So are lots of other things that go bump in the night and the really nasty ones are all around your house, waiting for nightfall.”

  Cole gripped his coffee mug. “So I could gut you with my hunting knife and you’d live anyway?”

  “I’d get pissed and I would bleed all over your kitchen and it would waste another few minutes. You have to focus, Cole.”

  He blinked. “How am I supposed to believe you?”

  “Drive down to the bridge. Try to drive over it,” Diego said. “Only, take a gun with you.”

  “I don’t have a gun,” Cole said. “What’s out there?”

  “Go and see,” Diego said impatiently. “Go on. I’ll wait. Just…be careful. Don’t get too close. They ripped the sides out of my car.”

  Cole stared at him, weighing it up. He settled, as he usually did, on the side of action first. He got to his feet.

  “Cole, no,” Zoe protested, jumping to her feet. “You don’t know what they’re like. They’ll kill you.”

  “I have to see for myself,” he said.

  Zoe followed him to the front door. Her face was pale. “You don’t understand this world,” she said softly. “They’re more than your average bear.”

  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.”

  Chapter Three

  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 f
or 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.”