Syndelle recognized the men lounging with relaxed menace in front of the house. They'd both been at the table with Big Daddy. "Will he be here?" she asked as she and Rafe moved toward the porch where the men waited.

Rafael shrugged. "Don't know. Big Daddy isn't on my list of people to keep track of."

Something in his tone made her ask, "But there are people that Brann has you watch?"

"You don't think he keeps me around just for my looks, do you?"

The mocking tone was back, but there was something else as well. She slowed her steps, wanting to prolong the moment, wanting to better understand the relationship between her two mates. "He takes your blood."

Rafael's steps slowed, too. He shot her a look, his smile both mocking and challenging. "And he wants everything else that goes with it...you do know that, right? Brann goes both ways and he's powerful enough to have two companions to satisfy his...assorted cravings."

Despite Rafael's sarcastic tone and the expression on his face, Syndelle could feel his tension along their link. She shrugged. "Among the Angelini, it is not uncommon for all the individuals in the bond to be lovers."

Surprise showed briefly on Rafe's face and flared along their connection, though his response was one she'd almost come to expect, one she was beginning to see as part of his complicated way of defending himself against being hurt. "So because your fathers fuck each other and your mother, you figured your mates would end up doing it, too."

Even anticipating Rafe's response, she couldn't keep the fire from racing across her cheeks. Sex and nakedness were not taboo in the Coronado household...nor were the sounds and scents of passion easy to mask around children with both vampire and wolf blood flowing through their veins. Still, she preferred not to think of her parents in that manner...and the image of Sabin and Riesen coupling was... Syndelle shook the thought aside before it could take hold. "No, it's not like that in my parents' bond, but is obviously that way among some."

A mix of emotions crowded the link between them, but there was no time for further conversation. Even moving slowly, they'd drawn near to the house and Big Daddy was stepping out onto the porch.

"Well, this is a surprise." He nodded slightly toward Rafe but didn't take his eyes off Syndelle. Like the night before, she could feel the power radiating off him, cold and ruthless. "What brings you here?"

"I wanted to speak with the girl," Syndelle said.

He cocked his head. "Now what's a soft piece like you want to get involved with one of Big Daddy's girls for?"

Syndelle cast around for an answer that didn't promise more than she could deliver or reveal her curiosity about Skye, finally answering, "I couldn't get what was done to her out of my mind. If I can help you find the person who did it to her, then I'd like to."

Big Daddy studied her for a long moment before saying, "Doc's got her doped up, but you can see her. You can see the other girls, too. Won't do you no good, though. None of them saw the motherfucker who messed them up. None of them remembers anything worth knowing, even with Big Daddy's friend Skye talking to them."

Syndelle and Rafe followed him into the house and down the hallway. The doors on either side were open and the girls inside the rooms looked up as they passed. Toward the end of the hallway, Big Daddy stopped at a doorway and motioned for Syndelle and Rafe to go ahead of him. They entered and moved to stand next to the bed.

The girl was heavily sedated, but even in that state, she was moaning and whimpering, her body flinching underneath the sheet as the horror of what had happened to her followed her into the drug-induced darkness.

From the doorway, Big Daddy snapped his fingers and Syndelle heard footsteps along the hallway-first retreating, then returning to stop next to him, bringing the smell of perfumed flesh and beer with them.

Syndelle studied the girl, wondering again why this human's pain had called out to her. "I don't even know her name."

Big Daddy grunted. "Calls herself Wren."

Syndelle placed her hand on the girl's bare shoulder, allowing her senses to reach for an answer.

For a long moment the girl remained trapped by the drugs coursing through her body, but then her eyes jerked open in alarm, her gaze collided with Syndelle's, and though it was not usually Syndelle's way to take what wasn't offered freely, she let the girl fall into the endless, hypnotic blue of her vampire heritage so that there was no wall separating her mind from the girl's, her will from the girl's.

Because a link had already been formed between the two of them, in the span of a heartbeat Syndelle took some of Wren's memories inside herself and felt the burn of the witch's mark on the girl's hip, as if it were her own. Then pushing beyond that, opening herself even wider, Syndelle moved through the faint traces of violence that still clung to the girl, gathering the psychic particles left by her attacker.

She shivered at the feel of him. At the anger, the need to revenge himself in an attempt to recover what had been stripped from him long ago. The helplessness that burned into a rage so deep and fierce that it would always express itself like this-finding power and release in raping, breaking, and finally carving his message onto the stomach of his victims.

The horror of it washed through Syndelle, aligning itself with the girl's memories of being bound, her head encased in a burlap bag, as her attacker spent hours silently venting his anger. His fear warring with his hatred so that he didn't dare let his victim see his face, so that he didn't dare take the final step and kill his remembered tormenter outright.

For a long moment Syndelle remained trapped in the world of the damned, and then slowly her shields drifted into place, separating her reality from this horror-filled one. She blinked, freeing the girl, freeing herself-for the first time becoming aware of the tears coursing down her cheeks.

Wren slipped away immediately, escaping back into a drugged darkness. Syndelle edged the sheet lower, exposing the girl's beaten, broken body, stopping only when she reached the mark on the girl's hip.

It was a brand, a coven mark, burned into the flesh and intersected by a pair of linked, tattooed pentacles-one of them inverted, symbolizing the second degree of initiation for a witch, the need to face the darkness within and not, as many of the untrained believed, the mark of one who practiced black magic. Syndelle pulled the sheet up, covering Wren's naked body before turning to Big Daddy.

"Are the other girls here?"

He snapped his fingers twice and two girls immediately stepped into the room as though he'd anticipated her request.

The girls had the same look about them as the girl on the bed-young with stringy brown hair and green eyes-though it was impossible to tell if the rest of their features had been similar. One girl had healed, if the misshapen, uneven face could be called that. The other girl's face was still swollen, distorted.

They kept their gazes downcast, only raising their eyes when Big Daddy snapped his fingers, though his attention didn't shift from Syndelle. "You need them to strip?"

Syndelle opened her senses, careful not to trap either of them in her eyes as she tested to see if a natural connection existed between them as it had with the girl on the bed. When she didn't find a link, she focused on one of them and said, "Do you have a brand or a tattoo?"

The girl pulled her sleeves back, revealing bracelets of tattooed barbed-wire, before pulling her shirt up, exposing her breasts and a ring of pentagrams in black and red around one nipple-the lower designs inverted by the artist in order to keep the chain continuous. "I've also got a unicorn on my ass and a butterfly on my ankle. You want to see those, too?" the girl said.

"No." Syndelle's gaze drifted to the girl whose face was still bloated with painful swelling. The girl turned and pulled up her shirt, revealing a back covered with savage swirls, a tangled jungle of surrealist, psychedelic images, including a creature holding a crystal ball containing an inverted pentagram.

Big Daddy shifted in the doorway and the girl moved, not dropping her shirt until she'd shown him her back as well. He nodded to himself before once again meeting Syndelle's eyes. "That all you want with them?"

"Yes."

The girls left without being told. Big Daddy straightened, taking a long swallow of beer before saying, "Big Daddy's got too many girls now to take a personal interest in all of them, otherwise Big Daddy would have seen what the Lady Syndelle saw. Motherfucker must have seen my girls stripping or paid for a private show."

"At Bangers?" Syndelle asked.

He took another swallow of beer. "Could be. Could be other places. Big Daddy's got a lot of action going down around town. So much action that he don't always know which girls are working where unless he's got a special gig lined up for them. Big Daddy's going to have to ask his boys where these three have been working."

"You'll get word to me when you find out?"

His smile flashed white against his dark face. "Big Daddy'll get word to the Lady Syndelle. Big Daddy'll also let his people know that the lady's got favors coming."

Syndelle nodded, retreating from the room, from the house-surprised and grateful when Rafael enfolded her in his arms as they reached the car, stroking her back and whispering, "Are you okay?" His grip tightening when he added, "I saw what you saw. I felt what you felt."

She hugged him back, taking comfort in his warmth, basking in his concern, her heart tightening with love at the knowledge that he'd slipped into her mind of his own free will, had joined with her as a true mate would when she'd needed him most. "I'm okay."

"Still want to go to Fangs?"

"Yes."

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