Dark Embrace (Principatus) (25 page)

Fuck.

He turned from the beach, looking west. Ven Watkins was nowhere to be seen, swallowed up by the waning night shadows. Or gone by other less natural means.

A strange beat throbbed in Ezryn’s temple. A charged tingle heated his flesh. He scanned the buildings stretching before him, the scattered lights glowing in their windows reflecting a populace about to start the new day. Already he could see the cafes and restaurants preparing for their morning customers. It wouldn’t be long before joggers appeared on the beach. Life had come to Bondi Beach, and he was standing alone on the sand with no close refuge from the sun. Even at his fastest, it would take him too long to get back to his home before the sun’s rays found his vulnerable flesh.

He had to move. Now.

Curling his fingers into fists, he launched himself forward, defying natural law as he propelled himself away from the lightening horizon. Jacob’s Woolloomooloo penthouse was five miles away. If he hurried—and he planned on doing just that—he might just make it.

It’s only four miles to Kings Cross…

The insidious suggestion flittered through Ezryn’s head. Four miles to Inari Chayse’s apartment.

A growl rumbled up his throat, the sound low and completely demonic. Four miles.

Go there, Ezryn. Take her. Claim her. Fuck the lying, deceiving sex demon until she screams and begs for mercy and then gorge yourself on her blood and body.

He moved through the rapidly filling streets, the houses and buildings nothing but streaks of shadows and light around him.

Three miles.

Two.

One.

The gaudy neon lights of Kings Cross flared in his sights, the distinctive stench of the suburb of sex and sin filling his nose.

Fuck her, Ezryn. Bite her.

Bind her.

He could almost believe her scent wafted on the still dawn air. Taunting him. Teasing him.

He moved in a dark blur through the waking streets. Past drunken tourists who had little memory of the night just gone and the harried beat cops trying to decipher from their slurs and mumbles where their accommodation was. Past early morning dog walkers and businessmen running late for their buses.

Faster. Closer. Closer to his destination.

And, in three effortless leaps, he landed on Jacob’s fourteenth story balcony, smashing the glass sliding door’s lock as he flung it open and stormed into his friend’s living room.

Jacob looked up from the newspaper on his lap, not a hint of shock at Ezryn’s appearance evident on his seamless face. “Well,” he said, a grin twitching on his lips, “this is a surprise. I didn’t know you’d taken up extreme
parkour
. Or is it extreme freerunning? I can never tell with the fads today.”

Ezryn didn’t respond. He couldn’t. All he could think about was seven short words. Seven short words that said it all.

Succubus. Sex demon. Fuck her. Bite her.

“I take it by your foul mood you’ve been visiting with the Principatus again.” The grin on Jacob’s lips stretched wide, although there was a tension around his eyes that seemed to mock the smile. “Is that why you didn’t answer my earlier phone call?” He paused, and for the briefest of moments that same tension pinched the skin on either side of his nose. “I wanted to tell you Eliah Bartowski was in Australia.”

Ignoring the unusual strain on Jacob’s face, Ezryn gave his friend a slow, cold smile. “Are you ready for hell on earth, General Ford?”

Jacob’s grin vanished, his body becoming still. “What have you done, Ezryn?” he asked, putting his paper aside and rising to his feet.

Ezryn turned away from his long-time friend and most loyal ally. Standing in the room’s cool shadows, he studied the soft line of the sun’s heat creep across the plushly carpeted living room floor. If he stood here long enough—a few minutes, if that—the golden light would find his feet and he would begin to burn.

Yet even that heat would pale to insignificance compared to the black rage Ven Watkins’s revelation had awoken in him.

His mouth filled with saliva and his nostrils flared, his mind turning to Inari Chayse. No, not turning to it. Turning to it would imply he’d stopped thinking about her. He hadn’t. Not at all. She’d been at the center of his every thought since he’d found her in the Pleasure Pussy. Every deluded, irrational, feverish thought. And now he knew why.

The anger boiling in his gut, his chest, twisted into a writhing snake of icy resolve. Ruthless purpose.

“Ezryn?” Jacob spoke behind him, his tone urgent. “What have you done? Tell me you haven’t killed the Principatus? Tell me you haven’t taken her life?”

Ezryn ignored him. He watched the weak morning sunlight inch toward him and smiled again, the feel of his fangs pressing inside his lips a clear reminder of who—
what
—he was. What he was and what he could do. What he was
going
to do.

“Ezryn?”

Jacob’s voice was a distant buzz lost in the roar of his blood in his ears. He lifted his stare to the window, studying the pale, golden-tinged blackness beyond and seeing only the Principatus. He looked forward to the coming night. Dark Ones, did he look forward to it.

Succubus.

Sex demon.

Fuck her.

Bite her.

“Kill her
.
”

Chapter Eight

“So what’s your plan now?”

Inari didn’t lift her head from her hands. She kept her stare fixed on the spot between her feet even as her sister’s voice played over her back like a cool breeze.

“You know you can’t keep running away forever, don’t you?”

She frowned at the floor, her teeth catching her bottom lip to gnaw on its fleshy fullness. She needed to shampoo the carpet. Or maybe rip it up and have new carpet laid. Or better yet, polish the floorboards beneath back to their original life, restoring them to what they’d once been. Or maybe—

“I’m not going anywhere, sis,” Tianya pointed out, each word growing colder. “I can stand here and watch you sulk all night if I must, and you know it. You’ve been at it for most of the day already, by the way. Just in case you didn’t notice.”

Tianya’s mocking statement made the skin on the back of Inari’s neck prickle, the sensation so like the warning she’d get when a demon was about.

When you were a Principatus, you mean?

The thought was a dagger of dark pain burying deep into her chest, and she stared harder at the spot of carpet between her feet. Maybe she should by some rugs? A shag one?

“You have to do something, In.” Tianya’s voice danced on the air behind Inari’s bowed back and she gritted her teeth. “You’ve submitted to a master vampire so many times now I’ve lost count.” Tianya paused. “The
same
master vampire.”

Damp heat blossomed in the junction of Inari’s thighs at her dead sister’s words, and she snarled silently.

“It’s like your body’s trying to tell you something,” Tianya went on.

“My body has shit for brains,” Inari mumbled, stubbornly refusing to take her eyes off the floor. “And do you really think I’m worrying about a vampire? After what just happened?”

“Contrary to what you think, I’m not always hanging around with you. Did something bad happen? Did you kick your toe on the table? Or drop mustard on your—”

“I let the demon that killed you escape,” Inari snapped, cutting her sister’s humored questions short. “I let him fuck with my head and get away.”

“Oh, that?” Tianya said, the question making Inari’s stomach roll. “And now you seem to have lost any ability to transform into your Principatus form, yes?” she continued, as if she knew exactly where Inari’s tormented train of thought was going.

“And now I seem to have lost any ability to transform into my Principatus form,” Inari repeated, the words a low murmur.

She let her gaze move over the floor, studying it with an unblinking stare. Maybe red plush pile carpet? The kind Hollywood was fond of laying on the floor of almost every brothel depicted on film. A fitting floor covering given her past existence, to be sure.

“Could this be a self-imposed punishment?” Tianya piped up, a judicious tone in her voice no eighteen-year-old should have, even one dead for over two and a half centuries. “Could you be crippling yourself with guilt?”

Inari closed her eyes for a quick moment, her throat thick. Guilt. Her sister’s murder, the leech demon’s escape…all her fault. And as much as she’d like to think her wretched grief came from nothing else but guilt, her mind kept coming back to one thing, one moment in the evening’s nightmare of events—Ezryn uttering six damning words.

I can’t stop thinking about you.

She swallowed at the tight lump in her throat. Succubus. She was succubus once more. Surely that was the only answer for a vampire wanting her, wasn’t it? She was a demon assassin and Ezryn was a demon. By that indisputable fact, there could be no other reason he would desire her.

He’d had hunted her down, seduced her, fucked her and now the succubus force she’d once wielded over men had ensnared him and he kept coming back for more.

She bared her teeth in a grim smile, her gaze flicking over the space between her feet.

Yes, definitely red plush pile. The color of blood. That way, when I kill the bloodsucking bastard no one will notice the stain on the carpet.

Tianya laughed. The sound made Inari’s nerves fray further. “When you kill him?” The air swirled behind Inari, a cool caress on her tense back, and she closed her eyes, refusing to shiver. “Seriously, sis, we both know you’re not going to
kill
the vampire. Lick him, maybe. Kiss him, definitely, but kill?”

“Shut up, Ti.”

“No.”

The single word struck Inari in the back of the head with a violent smack, hard enough to make her teeth click together. She flinched, and a surprised gasp caught in her throat. Tianya’s legendary patience, it seemed, had snapped.

“Why do you see me, Inari Chayse?” Tianya’s voice scraped at Inari’s right ear, her dead sister sounding more demonic than the ghost of a human should. “You’ve done so for a long time now, weeks before the master vampire came into your life, so we know I’m not just the product of sex with the bloodsucker. There must be a reason. Am I a ghost? The product of your loneliness? Your guilt? Am I your voice of reason or a curse you’ve inflicted upon yourself?”

Inari didn’t answer. Hot tears welled behind her eyelids, and she blinked them back. She wouldn’t cry. She wouldn’t.

“Well?”

“I see you because I love you,” she ground out, her eyes stinging. “Because I didn’t save you when I could have.”

“Bullshit,” Tianya snapped. The air above Inari’s crackled, as if each microscopic particle there had suddenly turned to ice. Very cold, very angry ice. “You were a sex demon doing what you were born to do when I died. I never expected you to save me, and I never blamed you for my death.”

“But the demon…the leech…” Inari swallowed again. “Because I refused him, he came after you.”

“Did you want to have sex with him?”

A repulsed shudder rolled through Inari and she shook her head. “No.”

Icy air trickled over Inari’s neck, down her shoulders, her back. She shivered, her skin breaking out in ripples of gooseflesh. “Did you tell him to find me in Salzburg? Did you give him my location?”

Inari ground her teeth. “Of course not.”

“Then stop it.” The air crackled with icy temper again. “I’ve had enough. I never expected you to save me, Inari, but I sure as hell expected you to save yourself.”

Inari jerked her head up, glaring at the image of her sister standing before her. “What does that mean?”

Tianya raised her shoulders in a little shrug. “It seems to me the Powers have had enough of your pathetic dithering and decided to send someone who
will
save you, whether you want him to or not.”

“And the vampire is that someone? Ezryn? A master vampire sent to save an ex-sex demon?” She let her expression turn overtly curious, crossing her arms over her chest and cocking her head to the side. “Tell me, little sister, what do I even need saving from?”

“Yourself. You’ve spent so long denying what you were, what you
are
, letting it scare you and control you, that until the master vampire came along sex had become nothing but a ghost more haunting than me, and I gotta tell you, I’m pretty damn haunting.”

With a snort, Inari dropped her head again, returning her stare to the floor. “You have no idea what you’re talking about. Shit, you’re not even here. I may as well be talking to the wall.”

“Interestingly enough,” Tianya said, “I find myself thinking the same thing.”

“Ha,” Inari barked. “When did you become a comedian?”

“When
you
became a stubborn pain in the ass.”

Inari snarled at Tianya through her fingers. “Go away,” she muttered.

Tianya responded with a short laugh. “Not until you tell me why you are denying so furiously—and irrationally, in my opinion—what you feel for the vampire.”

“Hate?”

Tianya cocked an eyebrow and didn’t say a word.