At the end of Desire Untamed, Tighe’s clone escaped Feral House with half Tighe’s soul. If Tighe doesn’t catch him and kill him soon, they’ll both die. Tied, as he is, to the clone, Tighe is beginning to see the clone’s attacks of innocent victims through the killer’s eyes. When he sees the clone attack a lovely FBI agent he’s never met, he feels an inexplicable grief at her death.
FBI Agent, Delaney Randall, isn’t killed. Attacked by the clone as she investigates the string of strange murders in D.C., she’s saved by the intervention of a bystander but not before the clone inadvertently releases a tiny bit of his life force into her. Soon she’s the one seeing the clone’s attacks, not Tighe. Tighe’s frustrated because he’d thought he could track the clone through the visions. But then he gets another vision, this one of Delaney looking into a mirror. He sees the bite mark on her throat, knows she’s the woman he’d thought he’d watched die. And he hears her name.
Tighe tracks Delaney down, knowing he has to get her out from between him and the visions even if that means killing her, though he doesn’t want to do that. Tighe steals into her apartment in his housecat form, then shifts and tries to press into her mind, to steal her memories of him and to disentangle her from the visions. But he fails. Whatever the clone did to her has made her immune to Feral mind-control. Instead of killing her, he takes her back to the safe house where he, Hawke, and Kougar have been tracking the clone.
Delaney thinks she’s been captured by the killer who attacked her and is determined to escape. Tighe tries to seduce Delaney, thinking he may have more success in getting into her mind that way, but when he manages to get control of her actions, but not her mind, her fear of him sky-rockets and he loses it, turning into a berserker. Tighe, with half a soul, is riding the edge of control and there’s nothing that sends him over the edge faster than the sight of fear in a woman’s eyes, the same kind of fear he’d seen in his human wife’s eyes centuries ago when he first went feral. Hawke and Kougar intervene before Delaney’s injured or before she’s seen Tighe’s fangs and claws.
Back in control, Tighe apologizes. Delaney can’t understand this bizarre man who is one moment terrifying and the next tender and worried about her. When she has another vision, she nearly blacks out with pain. Tighe realizes that touching her both eases her pain and allows him to see the vision instead of her. He, the clone, and Delaney are definitely connected. He sees the clone attacking people at the Lincoln Memorial and takes Delaney with him. By the time they get there, the vision has ended. It’s after dark and Tighe is attacked by draden which Delaney can’t see. When they find three fresh victims, Delaney accepts that Tighe didn’t kill them, that his assertion of being the killer’s twin must be right. And when she sees the draden bites, she begins to suspect there’s more going on here than she can comprehend. And Tighe is her only chance of surviving it.
When she gets another vision, they drive to the apartment building where the clone is terrorizing a woman and killing her babies. But the moment Tighe runs into the building to find the clone, Delaney calls the FBI. The clone sets the apartment on fire and escapes. Tighe rescues a toddler, painfully reminded of his own mortal daughter, Amalie, from centuries ago. As he carries her out of the apartment, he’s distracted by the mother’s gratitude. Too late, he sees the FBI agents aiming for him. Before he can run, he’s shot through the heart. He runs back into the building, shifts into a house cat and telepathically calls to Hawke and Kougar who grab the small cat and carry him out, unnoticed.
Tighe recovers. Delaney feels heartsick, thinking she got Tighe killed. Delaney gets another vision and spirals down into the dark, lost to it for the last time. Tighe feels her crying out for him and, through their connection, is able to track her to an FBI safe house where he breaks in and pulls her from that dark.
Meanwhile, in the mountains of Virginia, Paenther and Foxx search for Vhyper and the Daemon blade following Foxx’s gifted intuition. When Foxx insists on stopping at a small market, Paenther spies a lovely young woman who inexplicably catches his interest.
Tighe takes Delaney to a Therian safe house where tenderness and passion rise and they make love. He once more tries again to get into her mind, to free her from the clone’s connection, but as their minds are opened to one another, the tiger spirit leaps at Delaney, trying to claim her for its own. Delaney screams and the fear in her eyes shatters Tighe’s already thin control and he goes feral and badly injures her. She’s going to die without medical attention, but she’s seen too much. Lyon gives Tighe two choices. Bind her to him in a mating ceremony which will keep her from ever betraying him. Or let her die.
Out in the Blue Ridge, Paenther and Foxx visit the market a second time and the pretty young woman leads Paenther behind the back and they kiss. He’s stunned by his attraction to her.
Unable to let Delaney die, Tighe binds her to him in the mating ritual, but doesn’t bind himself to her, thinking that when this is over he might still be able to extricate her from this mess and send her back to her old life. But when the clone takes on Kara’s appearance and steals Delaney away, Tighe can’t find her. In his own need to keep from being permanently tied to her, he’s broken the link between them.
Out in the Blue Ridge, Paenther has become obsessed with the young beauty at the market. Foxx drives them back and tells Paenther to get her out of his system, which Paenther is all too willing to do. But when the beauty leads him into the woods and takes him into her body, Mage rings suddenly appear around the irises of her eyes and she enthralls him.
Tighe rescues Delaney, but in doing so, loses the last thread of control and falls into wildness. When Delaney finally wakes after her ordeal, she learns that Tighe is caged in the prison beneath the house, too dangerous to let loose. She demands to be allowed to see him, determined to pull him from the dark as he pulled her. Lyon and Kougar thinks she’s foolish, but hold Tighe down while she stares into his eyes. She manages to call forth the tiger spirit who in turn retrieves Tighe for her. She brings him out of the darkness. But not for long. Tighe’s soul is disintegrating and they fear he has only a day before he dies.
Tighe and Delaney share what they fear are their last hours together. Delaney talks him into showing her his tiger form and surprises him by not being frightened of him. As he tells her of his wife and daughter, Delaney helps him heal those old wounds. In an act of love, Tighe completes the mating ritual, binding himself to Delaney for as long as he has left. But as he’s doing so, Delaney senses the clone watching her through Tighe’s eyes and they realize that while they’ve been watching through the clone’s eyes while he feeds, he’s been watching through Tighe’s every time Tighe gazes into Delaney’s eyes. They finally understand how the clone has been keeping a step ahead of them. And how to potentially catch him and take him down.
But the trap doesn’t work. When the clone captured Delaney, he infected her with a bit of his dark essence, turning her into a channel key with which he intends to open the channel to the dark power deep in the earth. And as the Ferals set the trap for him, he calls Delaney to him on the goddess rock and cuts her open. Tighe, the only one bound to her is the only one who can reach her through the impenetrable wall of draden. Together, Tighe and Delaney battle the clone and win, but Delaney’s dying. But when Tighe retrieves his half of the soul from the clone, he pulls it back through Delaney, at his animal spirit’s direction, healing her. And turning her immortal. Tighe and Delaney rejoice that they now have an eternity to love one another.
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