Bloodline (11 page)

* * *

I woke all at once, my eyes flying open wide. My head felt as if it were being pounded from within by an oversize mallet. My limbs didn't respond to my mind's commands right away, and when they did, they were uncoordinated and weak. Focusing my eyes required no small effort, but I managed it, though it seemed to take an inordinate amount of time.

As I blinked away the sleep fog, I tried to get my bearings. I was lying on my back. There were pillows beneath my body. Soft ones. I was…I was naked. Yes, I
felt the chill air touching my skin. And something else, just as cool, but more substantial.

Hands.

Ethan's hands.

As I lay there, his palms moved over my right arm, skin brushing across skin, his touch more than a caress that made me tingle down deep. He was…looking for something.
Feeling
for something.

As I frowned and tried to lift my head, only to have it refuse to obey, Ethan moved his hands to my other arm, running them over it in the same thorough, tender way. From my fingers to my wrist, over my forearm to my elbow and along the tender skin inside the bend. He skimmed and squeezed and felt my biceps and triceps and up to my shoulder, and even underneath, and I bit my lower lip against the swell of unbearable pleasure. I bit it hard, but I couldn't feel my own teeth sinking into my flesh. I could only feel Ethan's hands on my skin.

And then he moved to my foot, and again he began that delicious, sensual hunt, as if for some tiny treasure. His hands skimming, his fingers pressing and moving in small circles. The ball of my foot, my ankle, each and every toe. And then to the calf, not missing an inch of flesh as he went. His touch moved higher, to my thigh, to the tender skin inside it, and then still higher.

I slapped his hand, a reflex that halted his progress. He turned his head, meeting my eyes, holding my gaze. “You're awake,” he said, and he sounded relieved.

“Obviously. The question is, why was I otherwise?”

“Those women—do you remember? At the cave?”

I nodded, impatient to hear the rest. Meanwhile, I scanned my surroundings, beginning with those nearest
to me. My bed, I discovered, was a chaise longue, a big one, deep and plush and brown. It was situated in one corner of a smallish room, a nice room.

“The weapons they used were tranquilizer guns.”

I lifted my brows, curious. “I wouldn't think any ordinary tranquilizer would be effective on a vampire.”

“I wouldn't, either. But then again, I've only been on the outside for a couple of years, and I've had no direct contact with other vampires. Apparently someone has come up with a tranq that
does
work on us.” He touched my upper arm, just below the shoulder. “One of the darts grazed you here. You must have received a small enough dose that the effect was delayed.”

“That makes sense.” Except that I hadn't felt the dart graze me. And yet, there on my arm was the evidence of it. A narrow cut, like a furrow in my flesh. Perhaps the heat of the moment had distracted me.

He had lost interest in explanations. His eyes were once again focused on my body, and his hands had resumed their intense exploration. He was about to continue his examination-by-touch of my inner thigh.

“And yet,” I said aloud, “it doesn't begin to explain why I am currently naked, or why you are currently touching every part of my body in an apparent attempt to drive me insane.”

My words stopped him again. He drew his hands away from me and sat up straighter on the edge of the chaise. “Sorry. I…” He paused, then looked me in the eye. “My brother was there.”

“Your brother? He was where?”

Ethan leaned over me once more, but this time only long enough to reach past me for a blanket that had been
tossed over the back of the chair, beyond my peripheral vision. He draped it over me before speaking. “He showed up in the woods just after you passed out and fell off Scylla. He was on horseback, too.”

I frowned hard, my vision sharper now as the drug began to wear off, and searched his face. “Are you sure
you
didn't get nicked with a dart yourself?”

“He was there. He rode up to within thirty feet of us, said you'd likely been hit by a tranquilizer dart, told me to bring you here because it would be safe, and then he took off in the opposite direction before I could even ask him…anything.”

I felt the pain in him.

He sighed and went on. “He was…like us,” he said softly. “He was a vampire.”

I blinked, knowing instantly what that suggested even before he repeated my own thoughts back to me.

“That means he was probably changed by the keepers and sent into the service of the DPI. He probably works for them.”

I nodded. But despite the fact that I was in complete agreement with him, I found myself wanting to give him hope that things were not what they seemed. “Not necessarily,” I said. “
I'm
a vampire. So are you. And neither of
us
works for them.”

“That's true.”

“
And,
” I went on, “you still haven't come to the part where you explain why you're groping me.”

He lifted one brow, sending me a wounded look. “Groping? I thought I was employing the tenderest of caresses.”

“All right. That, then.”

“Gee, thanks.”

I shrugged. “I didn't say I minded.”

He met my eyes, and the heat in his own was palpable. “You didn't?”

“Mmm, no. But on the other hand, I didn't get the feeling it was intended as foreplay.”

“It would have been much better if that's what I was doing.”

“No doubt,” I said, pouring sarcasm into it. In fact, I
didn't
doubt it. We would be good together, he and I. We would be…explosive. We'd been explosive when we'd done no more than kiss, and now I could hardly wait to have sex with him, even though I knew next to nothing about it. The desire was instinctive—and irresistible.

“I was looking for a tracking device.” I frowned, but he went on. “I've been thinking about what you said before. About how if they have some way to track you, it has to be something on the inside. And it makes sense. After I escaped—after James and I escaped, I mean—”

“If he
did
escape.”

“After
I
escaped, then, they might have decided to find a way to keep tabs on any future runaways. Maybe they implanted some kind of microchip or something.” He frowned, searching my eyes as thoroughly as he had been searching my body. “You said you remembered me. What else do you remember?”

Frowning, I thought back. “I lived in a room with another woman. Her name was…” I squeezed my eyes tight. “God, I can see her face. She was a strawberry blonde, with freckles just across the bridge of her nose, and blue, blue eyes. What was her name?”

Ethan's hand covered my clenched fist. “Don't try to
force it. Just let it come, holes and all, and tell me about what comes to you.”

But it infuriated me that I couldn't remember her name, when I could so clearly remember her face. Even her voice. “She had the brightest smile—when we were younger. I remember noticing that she smiled less and less as we grew up. By the time I decided to escape, she was like…like a—”

“I know. I know.”

“We bunked together. There were ten rooms in each of the little painted cinder-block buildings. Two of us to each room. Ours was called Cabin Ten. It was yellow. The twenty of us had a little kitchenette, a tiny living area, a television and some easy chairs. There were two bathrooms, one at each end.”

“Sounds just like my cabin. Twenty-one, other end of the compound. There were barracks, too, with two rows of cots and just enough space to walk between them. We'd spend thirty days in the cabins, then thirty in the barracks.”

“I don't remember that.”

“Anything else hitting your memory just yet?”

I lowered my head and thought of the dream, of the old man, but I couldn't bring myself to talk about that. Not yet. So I pushed it aside and searched elsewhere in my mind.

“I remember martial arts classes. I remember that's where I was going when I used to pass you every day. And I used to look forward to that as if it were—I don't know, a highlight of my existence. The way you would always look at me, right into my eyes, the way you would hold my gaze and how it made my stomach knot up and filled
me with…joy, just joy. And hunger. And—” I stopped talking there and bit my lip, because the memory was so real and so vivid that I was beginning to feel those things again now.

Drawing a breath, I steadied myself.

“It was the same for me, Lilith. Don't ever doubt it.”

“It can't have been,” I said softly. And I felt a burning in my eyes that I was sure was a very rare thing for me. “It can't. Because I never could have left you behind in that place. Not in a million years.”

He averted his eyes, but I felt the rush of guilt that filled him then. Clearing his throat, he started to speak, then seemed to change his mind.

Sighing, I went on. “What I do
not
remember is someone implanting me with any microchip or tracking device.”

I sat up slowly, looking around the house, my eyes pausing on the windows, my senses suddenly picking up. “They weren't implanting anything before you left, right?” I asked.

“No. Not that I know of, and I assume if they had been, they'd have found me long before now.”

“So if your brother found us by means of a chip that wasn't in use until after he left, then…”

“Then he really
has
been working for them all this time.” He rose to his feet in a rush of motion. “But that doesn't make sense. If he's working for them, why would he help us? He
helped
us, Lilith.”

“Did he?” I asked softly. “Or did he just set us up for a DPI trap?”

He went tense, his eyes widening just a little. There was a moment of silent intensity, in which I knew he was
scanning the night for any sign of someone else—friend or enemy, vampire or mortal—nearby. I knew it, because I was doing the same thing. And feeling nothing.

Yet.

“I don't believe he would do that,” Ethan said softly. And then he fetched a handful of clothes, handed them to me. I took them. Jeans close to my size, a T-shirt, even socks and tennis shoes. I looked at him, noticed he was wearing different clothes himself. “I found them here. James must have left them for us. Another effort to help us. But I think it would be a good idea for us to leave here, just in case.”

“I think that's wise.” I rose, unashamed and unembarrassed, and dressed. “We'll find a better place to rest, and if we get there early enough, I'll finish inspecting myself for any lump or bump that might be a subcutaneous bit of electronic gadgetry.”

“I really don't mind doing it for you,” he said. And he said it without changing his inflection, so that in the midst of the tension, the fear that we were sitting in the jaws of a trap that might spring closed at any moment, the remark truly made me smile.

“We'll see,” I promised.

He handed me a glass filled to the brim with something red. “Here. James told me there would be sustenance here. He was honest about that much, anyway.”

“Aren't you afraid it might be drugged?”

“No, since I drank some almost an hour ago.”

“That's reassuring, at least,” I told him, and downed it as Ethan quickly moved through the house, probably in search of any other items the sainted James had left for
us. Within moments he rejoined me, a small bundle under his arms.

We left the house, moving quickly to a large shed in the back, where I felt Scylla and Charybdis's presence before I heard or smelled them. They were alert already. Aware we were coming, I wondered, or sensing something else—like impending danger?

As we walked, it was as if I could feel eyes on me from the woods around us and from the house itself, as if we were surrounded by our enemies and would be attacked at any moment.

Yet I knew that was not my preternaturally sharp senses talking. It was my own fear.

We opened the barn door, and Ethan quickly reached into the stall for Charybdis, speaking soothingly and walking the massive stallion outside. As soon as he was out of the way, I gripped Scylla's halter and led her out, as well, swinging myself onto her back the moment she reached the open, where there was room.

Let's go slow and silent.
Ethan spoke to me with the power of his mind.

How, when everything in me is telling me to launch her into a full gallop?

He rode directly beside me, on the right, and his eyes met mine, his smile as reassuring as it could possibly have been.
Patience.