Cunningham, Pat - Legacy [Sequel to Belonging] (Siren Publishing Ménage Amour) (35 page)

“Get her into the van,” Wallace said, “and get the gasoline.”

“We don’t have time.”

“We’re making time. We’re going to finish this. This fucking bastard’s going down, and we’re going to hurt him as hard as we can as many ways as we can every damn step of the way.” His chin rubbed briefly through her hair before he lifted it to yell beyond her. “What the hell are you still doing here? Get the fuck out of here now!”

Who was he shouting at? Colleen blinked and just barely focused on a knot of mewling women. Did she know them? She thought perhaps she did, or should. Something horrible had happened to them, and to her. Her mind shied away from the details. She started to shake in spite of the two sets of male arms trying so desperately to comfort her.

Beset by a reality too horrendous to face, her mind shut down again. She thought she might be moving. Rising. Jeremy had picked her up. He carried her through the curtain into the restaurant area. She got a glimpse of the dark-skinned girl sprawled on the floor and staring numbly up at the ceiling. The tips of fangs rested against her lower lip. Colleen hastily looked away.

Her empty mind snapped back to the world when Jeremy set her down in the rear of the van. He swaddled her in the sleeping bag.

“Stay here,” Jeremy whispered to her between swift, hopeless kisses. “I’ll be right back, I promise.” He hefted a couple containers of gasoline and hopped out of the van.

No! Don’t leave me!
Aloud she whimpered and reached for him, but he was already gone.

Colleen hugged her legs to her chest and stared blankly at the walls of the van. Her blood scorched a frantic path through her veins, all headed straight for her crotch. More wetness pooled between her legs than beaded on her forehead.

She moaned and bit unconsciously at her knee. Her teeth pierced the fabric of her jeans and broke the skin. The heady scent of blood dried her throat and seared her tongue and slashed her belly with a stab of desire. She quickly straightened her legs. The brief movement eased her anxiety a bit. Before she could even begin to relax the desire swept back in and pummeled her with savage force.

Everything had gotten so…
too
. Too powerful, too bright, too sharp, too intense. The reek of gasoline clawed at her nose. The light through the windshield tore at her eyes. The few noises pounded at her ears, including the ones she made herself. Especially those. Her little, fearful whimpers shifted into one long, sustained growl.

For a moment, the world unraveled at the edges. It knit itself back up again in tangled strands of unbearable arousal.

The vampiress had done this. The bitch had somehow poisoned her with her tainted, undead blood. Colleen tried to cling to that, tried to stay lucid, but her rationality was slipping away from her like ooze down a drain. It left behind a thick coat of raw need that grated like sandpaper on her supersensitive nerves. Her fingers clutched the sleeping bag hard enough to punch holes in the quilting. She needed a male’s hard body and rough, groping hands. She needed to be fucked into oblivion, right now. All logic swirled away and left behind blind animal lust. She was drowning in it. She may have screamed aloud from it. She didn’t know for sure.

Her ears picked up a heartbeat. She threw herself at the sound like a starving madwoman and was greeted with the touch she craved. A deep male voice made sounds that may have been words. Colleen couldn’t understand them and didn’t much care at this point. He was here, with her. Only that mattered now.

Oh, he was good. So hot, so alive. His skin slid over hers like silk and deliciously rubbed every sensitive nerve ending until her entire body came awake with electric desire. He knew her needs before she recognized them and quenched her thirsts even as they formed. She pressed herself against the firmness of his chest and rubbed her groin against his rock-solid thigh. When had she lost her clothes? She couldn’t remember.

Just for a second, clarity hit her. Her senses broke the surface of the steamy swamp of mindless need that had engulfed her. Her name was Colleen. She was riding in the back of a van. The van was moving. They were back on the road. She quivered in the arms of a man she loved. The hands that caressed her, the mouth on her neck, the breath that puffed against her lips were real.

She blinked up into storm-cloud eyes with the heat of the sun behind them. This time she knew him. “Jeremy.”

“It’s all right.” He laid her back on the sleeping bag when she tried to rise. “I’ll take care of you.”

Where was the other? She wanted the other. She couldn’t remember his name. Her world had become a jumble of feverish touches and animal gasps, punctuated by microsecond, jagged flashes of sanity. She clutched at those flashes and hauled herself back to the brink of full awareness, only to feel her grip weaken and the human in her start to slide away.

Jeremy!
Jeremy, help me!

The rocking motion ceased. The van had stopped. Powerful, blunt-fingered hands and a sea-breeze scent replaced the name that wouldn’t come to mind. His thoughts shored up hers as his arms supported her body. Wallace. His name was Wallace.

“Wallace,” she gasped.

Her vision focused on his smirk. “Right here with you, sweetheart. It’s okay to let go. We’ll catch you. Right, Scarecrow?”

“Absolutely.”

Another wave of lust buffeted her body. She knew when Jeremy entered her and arched her hips to grant him better access. Her thoughts twined with Wallace’s while her pussy clamped around Jeremy’s rigid cock. With her men to keep her safe, Colleen let sanity desert her and gave herself over to the beast.

* * * *

Colleen stirred. Awareness crept back in at a sheepish crawl like a dog that had snapped the leash and run wild all night and finally made its way home. Her body ached and her throat itched. Her teeth had put on weight. The metal floor beneath her was rocking again. She found her head pillowed on a hard male shoulder and her naked body snugly wrapped in the sleeping bag. When she looked up into his loving smile, his name remained fixed in her head.

“Jeremy. What happened?”

God, her voice sounded so hoarse. What had she been doing with it? Not to mention the slimy taste in her mouth. What had she been doing with
that?

She tried to speak again. Her bitch of a brain picked that moment to clear and bring her up to speed.

“Whoa. It’s okay,” Jeremy said when she started to thrash. “It’ll all be okay. We’re almost home.”

Nothing he did, nothing he said, could blunt her rising panic. Colleen stared past his head. The world beyond the windshield had grown dark enough for Wallace to drive without peril.

He glanced back at her, concern in his eyes. “Hang on, sweetheart. The worst of it’s over. You’ll be okay in a bit.”

No, she wouldn’t. On some basic level she knew it. She couldn’t take her eyes off the night. The last thing she remembered with any real clarity was the she-bat’s wrist crushed against her mouth and icy blood sliding down her throat. The sun had been high then. She’d lost the whole afternoon.

“What happened?” she repeated.

“We won,” Wallace said curtly. “Details can wait until we get home.” Cautiously he added, “How do you feel?”

Strange. Different. Changed. Both not herself and more herself than she had ever been. “What did that bitch do to me?”

“Nothing that can’t be fixed.” He didn’t sound confident. He shut his mind away from hers, denying her that comfort. Or trying to protect her?

She shoved away from Jeremy. “Tell me. Tell me now.”

“When we get home,” he said. She recognized the stubborn finality in his voice. The men had closed ranks against her. A surge of resentment blasted through Dangerous Colleen. How dare they treat her like this?

She bit down hard against a scathing retort and yelped when her teeth pierced her own bottom lip. Blood smeared her tongue. What the hell? Her teeth hadn’t been that sharp this morning. Or as heavy, or as long.

Listen to them
, her well-developed denial muscle counseled.
They’ve got a point. So do you. Two of them, in fact.

No. All that had been a dream, a hallucination. It had to be. It couldn’t be real. This time when her mind opted for the easy way out, Colleen didn’t protest or fight. She let her body slump against Jeremy’s and allowed the blissful faint to take her away.

* * * *

The metallic rumble of the van door sliding open brought Colleen back to the world. They were home. Neither Wallace nor Jeremy spoke. Equally silent, Colleen walked between them to the door. She was proud of the steadiness of her steps. She’d used up the last of her denial cards. From here on out, she’d have to face her new reality head on.

She knew her heart should be pounding like mad. She couldn’t hear it. She could hear Jeremy’s, a triple-time thump, but not her own. That bothered her more than the teeth.

Once inside, she turned on them both. “All right, let’s have it. Straight-up truth. No more lies to ‘protect’ me. What happened back there?” Her denial made a feeble bleat. She shoved it back down. “What did she do to me?”

Colleen glared from one to the other. Jeremy stood beside her with his hand on her shoulder and his arm around her waist. Wallace stood before her with his green, unblinking stare. Jeremy made the slow, deep-lunged sigh Wallace couldn’t.

“You already know,” Wallace said. “We were right. Bat blood was the trigger. She made you drink, and then you drank on your own.”

Oh yeah.
That
memory. Be nice if she could scrub it out of her brain. Details were blurry, emotions razor sharp. She’d marked the blonde bat as competition and set out to destroy her and damn near pulled it off. It hadn’t been Miss Colly from the preschool who’d dived for the vampire’s throat. She didn’t want to have to face the woman—or creature—who had.

Would she still show up in mirrors, or was that only myth?

“I’m a vampire,” she said dully. Out loud it sounded even worse.

“Only part,” Jeremy said. “The rest is human.”

“How human?” She swung her gaze to Wallace, pleading for any scrap of reassurance. “How much rest is left?”

He paused too long before he answered. “You have a heartbeat. It’s slow, but it’s there. Sunlight didn’t bother those other girls. It shouldn’t hurt you either.” He took her hand and gripped it tight. “Your skin is warm.”

“So is yours,” she countered. “And you’re not…” She couldn’t finish.

“No,” he said, “I’m not. I’ll teach you how to deal with the part of you that’s not. We’ll get you through this. It won’t be so bad.”

“No?” She would have laughed if she wasn’t afraid it would dissolve into hysterics. Deliberately, she skinned back her lip. Even Wallace flinched at the sight of her new, hefty fangs. At that flinch, the crack in her heart widened.

“I drank blood. I
wanted
to drink blood. I have to drink blood now, right? For the rest of my life. Oh God. How long is that going to be?”

“You don’t have to hunt,” Wallace said. “You’ll never have to hunt. I’ll bring you blood. Or—or you can drink from me.”

“And me,” Jeremy said. Her revulsion must have shown in her eyes because he added quickly, “Maybe you won’t need all that much, since you’re not a full vampire.”

“Even a swallow’s too much,” she shot back. “It did something to me. In the van I…” She bit that back and blushed furiously.

“Uh, yeah,” Wallace said. “That was blood lust. It only happens if you chug too much at once.”

“You mean it only happens to vampires.”

Wallace looked at the rug. “Yeah that, too.”

Jeremy hugged her fiercely. “You don’t need to go through that every time, or at all. If you take a little every now and then, you’ll be okay. My mom lived that way for centuries. Wallace lives that way now. All you need is portion control. Bingeing’s never a good idea, no matter what your diet.”