the soil, a necessary skill to protect them from the sun or to hide the corpses of their prey, but Viper was particularly skilled and in less than a blink of an eye Roke was buried up to his waist.
“Are you two done playing?” Styx demanded, his icy power biting through the air.
The clan chief of Nevada climbed out of the sand pit and dusted off his jeans, his expression as inscrutable as ever.
“For now.”
Viper made a sound of impatience. “Why are we here?”
Styx nodded toward their companion. “Roke has something he believes we should see.”
“His collection of blow-up dolls?”
“Christ. Enough.” Styx bared his massive fangs in warning. He didn’t know what the hell had gone down between the two clan chiefs in the past, but right now he could not care less. He didn’t have time for their bullshit. “Roke, show me.”
“This way.”
In utter silence the three vampires ghosted through the darkness, moving with a speed that made them all but invisible. They were nearing a line of rugged hills when Viper made a sound of impatience.
“As much as I adore running through the barren desert, do we have an eventual destination?” he muttered.
On cue Roke came to a sharp halt, pointing toward the desert floor just in front of them.
“There.”
Viper rolled his eyes. “Man of few words.”
“Preferable to one who doesn’t know when to shut it.”
“Agreed,” Styx said dryly, shifting so he could study the ground where Roke was pointing. It took a long moment to recognize that lines etched into the dry dirt were more than just the graffiti from some human. “Oh ... shit.”
“What the hell?” Viper tilted back his head as he caught the lingering scent. “Were.”
“Cassandra,” Styx said, easily recognizing the scent of his mate’s twin sister who had recently been revealed as a powerful prophet.
“And Caine,” Viper added. “Why would they be in the middle of the Mojave Desert?”
Now that was a hell of a question.
The pair of pureblooded Weres had been missing for weeks, despite Styx’s best efforts to locate them. An unbelievable feat considering he possessed the best trackers in the world. Of course, if the rumors were true then the two Weres were already beyond his reach.
It made any clue as to how Cassandra had been captured, or how to retrieve her from her current prison priceless.
“I’m more concerned with what they left behind,” he admitted, prowling around the edges of the strange symbols.
Viper frowned. “An etching?”
Styx shook his head. “It looks more like a hieroglyph.”
“A prophecy,” Roke said with a quiet confidence.
Styx turned to study the clan chief with a searching gaze. “Can you decipher it?”
“Yes, it’s a warning.”
Viper frowned. “You’re a seer?”
Roke shook his head, his gaze trained on the lines etched into the ground.
“There’s only one prophet. But I was sired by a wise woman who taught me to read the signs left by our forefathers.”
Of course. Styx abruptly understood precisely why he was standing in the middle of a desert.
“So now we know why Cassandra chose to travel to Nevada,” he said wryly.
“Why?” Viper demanded.
He pointed toward Roke. “Because it was the one place to make certain her message would be understood.”
Viper snorted. “She could have sent a text and saved us a trip.”
Styx’s attention never wavered from the silent Roke. It was impossible to judge how the vampire felt about being pulled into the battle against the Dark Lord.
But then, he no doubt realized that it wasn’t a choice.
Styx wasn’t the head of a damned democracy.
He led his people by cunning and brute force when necessary.
“How did you discover this?”
“A cur stumbled across it two nights ago,” Roke promptly answered. “There are no Were packs in the area so
