To Crave a Blood Moon (2 page)

Annika returned to him.

He forced himself away, floating outside himself, watching like a spectator as the two bitches played with him, a mouse in their paws. As they had done for months now.

Two moonrises had passed since they captured him off the streets. Two moonrises he had endured all manner of depravities. They enjoyed his resilience, their freedom to torture him again and again.

Annika's hand gripped his cock, her touch soft and coaxing, directly opposite from the savagery that edged her features.

The only time they ever treated him to gentleness was when they wanted to rouse him. Physically, he could not prevent himself from responding. His body had become his worst enemy—his greatest weakness. No matter how he loathed them, they succeeded in using him.

The scrape of hinges filled the air momentarily, saving him from the females' appetites. A warm blast of air swept into the frigid cell, accompanied by light. The suddenness of it stung his eyes. He held a hand over his face, squinting to see who his newest tormentor would be.

Gunter stood there. The pack alpha had made only two appearances since Sebastian's capture. Once at the beginning of his captivity, and another a month ago… to check on his progress.

With a snap of his fingers, the two females left Sebastian's side, their heads dipped in deference to the pack's master. With lingering glances full of dark promise, they left him alone with the alpha.

Gunter entered the cell, his well-tailored linen slacks and white shirt a stark contrast to the dungeon that had become Sebastian's world.

Standing over Sebastian, he grimaced at the sight of his soiled and naked body, shaking his head. “You look like shit.”

Sebastian levered himself up on his elbows. The chains rattled, the manacles at his ankles and wrists pulling, digging into bone. His skin had long rubbed free. Raw muscle and sinew hung in torn tatters. Until free of the manacles, his body could not regenerate.

“Your hospitality has lacked somewhat.”

“Indeed?” The alpha cocked his head to the side, amusement lacing his voice. “Any number of men would be glad for the attention you've been given. Fucked daily by beautiful women. What complaint can you possibly have?”

Sebastian's lip curled. “Is that what you call them? Women? I think sewer rats a more apt description.”

Gunter tossed back his head with a laugh. After a moment, he sobered, his silver eyes a steady molten stream. “All for naught, it would seem. None of them are breeding. It appears we are not a compatible species, after all. Shame.”

Sebastian tensed, both relieved and alarmed. Since he never made it a habit to sleep with lycans, he had not known if he could impregnate any of the females who had used him for stud in the last weeks.

Gunter continued, “Unfortunate, I know. I cannot breed your special talents into my pack. So what shall I do with you?” He cocked his head in contemplation, tapping his lip. The room's shadows cast menacing lights to his features.

“I've an idea,” Sebastian murmured, lifting one manacled wrist to his propped knee as if he were not chained to a wall in a dungeon. “You can let me go.”

Gunter tsked. “So you can continue picking off my kind at your leisure? I have enough to worry about as
it is without setting some hybrid loose who fancies himself the annihilator of my race.”

Sebastian shrugged, trying to appear unaffected as he lied, “Who says I have to continue my ways?” Hunting his distant brethren was what Sebastian did best. Until now, until he'd been captured, he'd excelled at it. He would never stop.

“No. Can't have you running about,” he continued as if Sebastian hadn't spoken. “I've other problems. We're at war with a particularly bothersome cell of lycans on the rise in the west.”

There'd always been feuding between packs. A territorial species, they could never come to an accord, which was man's greatest defense against them. “You mean I might be lucky enough and you might kill each other off.”

Gunter's eyes glittered an unholy silver. “I had hoped you would be a useful weapon. And you may yet.”

Unease crawled through his chest, cracking at his armor of numbness, just a fissure, but the first crack nonetheless. “How is that?”

“I need merely convince you to join our side.”

Sebastian snorted. “That will never happen.” He possessed a soul. Nothing would change that… change him into a demon that glutted himself every moonrise and sank deeper and deeper into damnation.
He wasn't damned. No matter that his mother spent her life reminding him that at his core he was Satan's spawn.

“Oh, it will happen.” Gunter strode several feet and lifted Sebastian's breakfast tray from where Annika had kicked it in her haste to have him this morning. Before the day's depravities began, he had licked his bowl of oatmeal clean, desperate for the nourishment. “You might just be a half-breed dog, but the half of you that's like me will guarantee it will happen.” He rolled a finger against the inside of his bowl, then tasted. “Hmm. Honey. Sweet. But your next meal will be even sweeter—of the human variety.”

Blood rushed to Sebastian's head, and he grasped at his roiling emotions, desperate to keep them in check, buried deep where they could not be detected by his brother a world away. He'd lasted this long, he could hang on longer. He had to.

“Never fear, I shall make certain it's something delectable. Female, of course. And young. The freshest is always young.”

He surged against his chains, the steel striking his wrist bones with a clang that should have been agony… but only paled beside the horror of the alpha's words. “You bastard—”

Laughing, Gunter strode from the cell. The heavy
door clanged shut after him, the bolt sliding home the final sound in the charged silence.

Sebastian dropped his head to his bare knees, his fingers digging cruelly into his flesh. His heart raced. Emotion rose hot and thick in his throat, choking, ready to spill free.

No, no, no, no…

If they starved him and trapped him with a human, who knew how long he could fight his instinct to survive, how long before he became one of them… animals ruled by hunger?

Then he would be utterly and irrevocably lost. The fate his mother always feared would be his.

A flash of memory filled his head. A night long ago. A hundred years past. He lay in bed. A boy. His twin slept soundly beside him. The wind outside their mountain cottage howled, shaking the shutters. Only firelight illuminated the sparse confines.

His mother emerged over the two of them, a knife poised, ready to strike. Then she crumbled, sobbing, unable to kill the pair of demons she had spawned. He had watched her from thinly parted eyes as she staggered across the room and dropped to the hearth before the fire, the dagger still clutched in her hand. He knew then. Knew that whatever he was didn't deserve life.

Unfortunate that she had not found the strength
of will. Unfortunate that a mere knife would not have ended his life. For he now sat a prisoner in a rotting cell… waiting for the beast within to surface and devour whatever hapless female they chose to toss at him. Maybe his mother should have finished him then and spared him—spared the world.

Emotion burned through him, incinerating all shields he had constructed. He could no longer fight it. Closing his eyes, he rolled his head against the cold wall, unable to stop the despair from flowing free.

P
ALACIOS
, T
EXAS

Rafe Santiago woke with a scream thick in his throat. Instantly, his wife was beside him, wrapping her arms around his sweat-dampened chest in a fierce hold.

“Rafe, what is it?”

“Sebastian,” he spit out between gasps. “He's in trouble.”

His eyes locked with Kit's. The green pulled him in, a calming balm to the stark horror he had just felt. His brother's horror. They had always felt a connection, a bond that could stretch across the ocean which separated them.

Seb had felt Rafe's turmoil when he turned Kit
into one of them—a hybrid lycan, a
dovenatu,
a rare species created through the mating of a lycan with a female descendant of Etienne Marshan—the world's first lycan.

Kit's voice swept through him. “Then we'll find him.”

Slowly, he nodded. Rafe had been unable to reach his brother for months now. Not unusual. Sebastian was like that. Aloof. Solitary. He had broken free from Rafe years ago. Still, Rafe had suspected something was wrong. Whenever he tried to tap into his brother's head, he only got gray static.

He suspected. And now he knew.

Rising from the bed, he faced the window, staring down into the yard and beyond at the gently swelling waters of the bay. The swing on the porch where he and Kit sat after dinner creaked in the breeze.

“Did you… sense where he is?”

He recalled the dream, saw the awful room, felt Seb's pain, his battered body as if it were his own.

Seb's tormentor had spoken in Turkish. “Turkey. The last time I heard from him he was hunting a pack in Vienna. Something took him east. I can track him.” He splayed a hand against the cool glass, fingers curling, pressing as though he would shatter the delicate barrier. “We'll need help.”

He felt her move behind him. Her small hand
came to rest on his shoulder. His brother would never have been taken easily. Only an army of lycans could bring him down. They would need their own to go after him.

“Darius,” he said.

“Gideon,” she added.

He nodded. The four of them would be a force for any army to face, mortal or otherwise.

Ruby Deveraux woke with a sharp gasp tight in her throat. Her dream vanished like fast-fading smoke. She willed it gone, willed the frightening images and sensations from her head. She was good at that. Good at tossing up barriers.

Pulling the comforter tighter, she burrowed into the hotel bed, groaning as she eyed her murky surroundings. Sleep rarely gave her any sense of peace. How could it? Her defenses fell then. Dropped like a row of dominoes. Especially in a place teeming with people. Their thoughts and emotions hunted her in sleep, penetrated the closed shutters of her hotel room, finding her, becoming her own.

Rolling to her side, she inhaled the pungent aroma
of Turkish roses outside her window. Her dream clung, not yet ready to let go. A brutal shadowland of dark images that twisted with pain. Flashing teeth, snapping, tearing… rancid-hot breath on her neck.

She hadn't dreamed of monsters since she was a child. Not since her father deserted her. The months following that had been fraught with nightmares.

Still tired, she chafed her palms against the side of her face. In a few days, she would be on a plane home. Soon she would be safe in her house again. Safe and blessedly alone.

Sighing, she dragged a hand through her loosened hair and rolled her head side-to-side on the pillow, stretching her neck. Nothing would lure her from her hotel room tonight. The peanut butter crackers in her luggage would work for dinner. She needed to gather her energy to face the onslaught of tomorrow. Airports were never fun. Plenty of negative energy there.

Adele had been right. An empath should never stray too far from home. But Ruby had insisted she could handle it. The constant throb at her temples told her how wrong she had been. She should never have agreed to the trip. It wasn't like back home, when she could leave and escape the solitude of her farmhouse. Adele had warned her, tried to tell her there would be nowhere to run, but Ruby hadn't listened.

This trip had been important. A grand gesture of rebellion—freedom. Something she had to do to give back, to help girls like her. Like the girl she once had been.

The sunset call to prayer rang outside her hotel, vibrating the window's shutters. Solemn and dark… almost like everything else in this foreign land.

The familiar urge to flee seized her. Maybe she could catch a late-night flight out of Istanbul. She could be back in Louisiana tomorrow.

The rattle of a key in the lock had her peering at the door. Rosemary entered. The retired social worker looked closer to seventy than her fifty years. Hard lines edged her eyes and mouth, and when Ruby stared at her she felt only her weariness, her deep dissatisfaction with the world.
Defeat
.
Sourness
. It pulled her down, weighed her into the hotel bed.

Moving about the room, kicking off her shoes, Rosemary studied her for a long moment. “Rough day?”

Only two people knew of Ruby's…
gift
. Rosemary, who placed her in home after home. And Adele Summers, her best friend. Her only friend in Beau Rivage. Everyone else just wrote her off as the weird eccentric who lived on the old Deveraux farm.

She nodded weakly. “Yeah.”

“I thought bringing you along as a chaperone wouldn't work.” She sighed and Ruby felt the full bitter wave of her disgust. It wasn't new. Rosemary often felt disgusted with her over the years, mostly due to Ruby's inability to keep a foster family. She grimaced. Families had never wanted her once they realized what she was.

“I can't hide away forever.” God knew she had hidden long enough.

“Well, what good are you to yourself or the girls when you get exhausted before noon? You should have stayed holed up at your farm.”

Ruby swallowed down the lump in her throat. True. What kind of chaperone was she if she had to hide away instead of chaperoning the girls?

“What are you doing here? I hope you didn't skip dinner to check on me.”

“I wouldn't do that. I came back here to look for Amy and Emily. Hoped they were in their rooms.”

Ruby frowned. “Shouldn't they be at dinner?”

“
Should
is the operative word. I just checked their room. They both complained of stomach aches and took a cab back here earlier.” She shook her head. “Those two. I never thought I'd ever have a kid under my care that could give me more grief than you, but they take the prize.”