Kiss of a Dark Moon (10 page)

H
e was too late.

The sounds of splintering furniture and shattering glass carried through the door, and he knew instantly that they were already here. They had gotten to her first. Evidently with the same information EFLA had fed him regarding Kit's location.

His jaw clenched, teeth grinding together so tightly he tasted the coppery wash of blood in his mouth.

If lycans stood on the other side of the door…

Damn Laurent to hell. It wasn't supposed to go down this way. This was the very thing that was
never
supposed to happen.

He knew what lycans could do to a female. He had seen the aftermath, the haunting look that would come into his mother's eyes every now and then. Her soft tears at night when she thought he and his brother were sleeping.

For all he knew, what he hoped to prevent—what EFLA strove to stop—was happening even now. Again.

He begged to God that he wasn't too late.

A descendant of Christophe Marshan, Kit could not be violated at the hands of a lycan. He regretted not making that risk clear to her before. He regretted waiting. Regretted not telling her everything. The truth. No matter how she would look at him once he did.

Using his shoulder, he burst through the door, his blood simmering, scalding in his veins at the scene to greet him. He paused at the threshold, fists curling and uncurling at his sides. His bones seemed to expand, to stretch within him at his deep inhalation.

One lycan thrashed wildly about the room, falling heavily to his knees, then on his back, feverishly clawing his shoulder where a bullet had already penetrated. Rafe sniffed, inhaling deeply. A silver bullet. He would be dead in a matter of minutes if he did not dig it out. A real possibility. Some lycans had been known to sever their limbs in an attempt to stop the silver from slowly poisoning them to death.

A second lycan had pinned Kit to the floor. She squirmed beneath him, bare legs thrashing as they wrestled for the gun. He struck her in the face. Her head smacked the floor with a sickening thud, hands falling limply at her sides.

Blood trailed from a nasty gash at the corner of her mouth, the streak of crimson obscene against her skin.

The warm sweet smell of spilled blood floated toward him.

The lycan leaned over her and swiped a finger along her bloodied lip, tasting her and moaning in appreciation.

Typical. The bastard had not even noticed him yet. When it came to their victims, lycans were single-minded in their focus. Especially this close to moonrise, when their hunger was at its zenith.

Something dark and grim—toxic as silver was to these monsters—stirred in Rafe's gut at the sight of Kit's injury, of the lycan tasting her, at the dazed, unfocused look in her lovely green eyes.

Rage flared within him, a dangerous burning in his gut, spreading outward, racing along the path of his bones. The fiery heat burst in his chest, an explosion of force that fed his body.

His skin tingled, smoldered. A familiar scratchy, prickly sensation swept over him. Unwelcome. Yet unable to prevent. He rushed the room, a low growl escaping through his tightly ground teeth.

The bastard atop Kit swung his gaze to look up at Rafe, baring his teeth in a snarl.

A return growl rose up from deep in Rafe's chest. His fingers flexed at his sides.

He felt his bones begin to stretch, pull…

The lycan moved off Kit in a low crouch, rolling his shoulders back, readying himself to pounce.

“Rafe,” Kit gasped, her head twisting to view him better. The barest moment passed as her green gaze locked on him. Relief flickered there…and bewilderment. He knew he must not look quite himself. And yet he knew he had to act. Before
it
took root. Before she made total sense of what she was seeing.

He snatched a lamp off the table and launched it through the air above his head, smashing it into the overhead light. The fixture exploded in a shower of popping and hissing sparks. Broken glass rained down on them as darkness swallowed the room.

Only the dim red haze from the motel's perimeter lights spilled through the open doorway, saving them from total blackness. Rafe's vision adjusted to the dark gloom. The red cast to the room, the crouching lycan, Kit's wide gaze—all lent a surreal quality to the moment. As if they were in an antechamber of hell itself.

But it was dark enough. Enough for what he would do. What instinct demanded of him. What Kit could not witness.

Succumbing to his animal side, a dark rage that he always held in careful check, he surged forward in one lunge.

Blood filled his vision, boiling through him as he met the lycan in a fierce crash of flesh and bone. Their spitting growls filled the room. His hands wrapped around the other's neck, determined to wreak his vengeance.

For himself. For Kit. For lifetimes of past wrongs.

 

Kit sat up and squinted into the darkness, wincing as she brushed a hand against her throbbing lip. She inhaled thinly through her nostrils, struggling against the darkness and an aching head to follow the movements of Rafe and the lycan.

Rafe.

She had seen his face briefly, registered the anger in his expression, the fierce glittering in his dark eyes. For a moment they did not even look brown, glinting a cool gray, almost silver. Like the bloodthirsty lycans intent on destroying her. Certainly a play of the light. A trick of her imagination. She had, after all, managed only a glimpse before he shattered the light, plunging them into shadows and death.

Why had he done that? Lycans possessed excellent vision. They could see him even in the dark. The lack of light could only incapacitate him.

And yet that single glimpse of him had been enough to reassure her that the only thing he was bent on destroying was her attackers. She didn't know how he had found her, but she felt only relief that he had.

In the fleeting second when the door had burst open and Rafe stood on the threshold like some sort of dark angel—his large shape limned in muted crimson light, quivering, vibrating in the glow—her heart had ceased to beat. Silhouetted at the threshold—the ravaged door hanging only by a single stubborn hinge—it crossed her mind that she faced not a dark angel, but a demon emerging from the mouth of hell.

Then he shot forward in a blur of movement. Impossibly fast. So quick she thought she had imagined it.

She scrambled to her bare knees on the flat, threadbare carpet, peering into the gloom and trying to follow the two shapes locked in a struggle. They appeared almost as one writhing shape. Her hands moved fast, stretching over the carpet in search of her gun, fighting against the dizziness in her head.

A low, gurgling sound reached her ears, followed by a sick, crunching sound—bone on bone. Her hands stopped, hovering over the grimy carpet.

Then the large merged shape broke, fell apart as one body collapsed heavily to the floor, mimicking the drop of her heart.

She went utterly still, staring at the shape still standing. Rafe? Or the lycan?

A harsh silence fell.

Inhaling a deep breath, she fought against the ever-increasing pounding of agony in her head and groped for the bed. Gripping a fistful of the bedspread, she shot a desperate prayer to the night.

Several more moments passed. The silence, thick and suffocating, played with her sanity. She could not stand one more minute of it. She had to know.

“Rafe?” she whispered, her heart beating like a loud drum against her chest as she stared at the figure rising and unfolding to his full height.

The dark shadow moved toward her, his features indistinguishable. The blood glow of light hummed around him, seeming to echo the ringing in her head.

She edged back from the bed. The muscles in her arms straining as she dragged herself away, hands clawing the carpet—and her fingers brushed cold steel.
Her gun.

With an excited gasp, she fumbled for the weapon, her movements sluggish, slower than she would like, than she needed them to be.
Dammit.
She needed speed and a clear head right now.

A hard hand grabbed her calf, nearly startling her into dropping her weapon.

A quick glance down at the floor revealed glowing, silver eyes moving toward her.

“Shit!”

She had forgotten about the injured lycan, dismissed him, thinking him as good as dead. Even if he was shot only in the shoulder, the silver should have done its work. He shouldn't have been able to crawl across the carpet and hold fast to her leg, to dig his nails savagely into her flesh.

“Just die,” she hissed, kicking at his shoulder again and again.

A growl rumbled over the air, lifting the hairs on her arms.

Her throat tightened, killing her breath.

Convinced Rafe had lost, that the shadow rising was the other lycan intent on finishing her off, she adjusted her grip on her gun and fired at the beast clinging to her leg.

With a dying grunt, he released his hold on her and let his head drop with a thud to the floor.

She spun around and fell alongside him from the abrupt motion. Her stomach heaved. Spots danced before her eyes. Fighting against sudden dizziness, she began to squeeze the trigger again just as the shadow lunged forward in a blur.

Gasping, her fingers tightened on her gun, determined not to lose it again.

“I'd really rather you not shoot me.”

“Rafe.” She breathed, her arm sagging, matching the loosening inside her, the easing within her too-tight chest. The gun dropped from her fingers.

“Kit.” In the dark, his hand somehow unerringly landed on her cheek. “Are you all right?”

She nodded, the motion making her all the more dizzy. She swayed on her feet and winced at the show of weakness.

“Kit,” he said again, and his voice suddenly sounded so far away, as if he were calling her from a great distance.

His arms caught her as she toppled over, strong bands that felt solid and firm. Warm over her nakedness.

Her lids pulled low, twin weights tugging down over her eyes that she could no longer fight.
Damn.
She loathed weakness, loathed that after working so hard to be the best, to be strong, capable of taking care of herself, she was on the verge of passing out.

“No,” she whispered in a weak thread of voice, her hand knotting in his shirt, twisting the fabric as she felt herself slipping away, becoming boneless and limp in his strong arms. Arms that felt good, better than they should. A man whose arms she should flee.

“I'm here, Kit, I'm here,” he replied in a voice unusually thick, guttural and low, almost as if his mouth were stuffed with cotton. Still, the sound of it swept through her like an infusion of Claire's Christmas wassail, equally potent, burning a path to her belly.

I'm here, Kit.

And she knew he was. Even as she knew that she could not give in, could not let herself surrender.

I'm here, Kit.

The words comforted her as they shouldn't. Especially coming from
him.

Nothing had changed. He was still her enemy. Still someone she needed to escape, but she could not stop herself from sighing against the hard wall of his chest, from inhaling the warm male scent of him. From thanking God he had come.

Her resistance gave out as her fingers uncurled from his shirt. She succumbed to darkness, dimly accepting that there was no fight left in her—and knowing that when she woke he would be there. With her.

She would fight him then. Later.

 

Intense relief swept through him as Kit fell limp in his arms, as soft and malleable as a sleeping child. Cradling her close, he felt her slow, steady breathing ripple through her and pass into him. She lived.

His vision adjusted further to the gloom, assessing the details and nuances of her face, calm and serene in sleep. Her lower lip was puffy, smeared with drying blood. He ran a hand over her head, stopping at the goose egg–size knot buried in her soft curls at the back. Likely a concussion.

A deep sigh rattled loose from his chest. She was unharmed. He inhaled deeply. They had not raped her. The prophecy would not come to pass. At least not in her.

His hands skated over her gentle lines and curves, searching for further injuries, striving to evaluate her with clinical dispassion. The woman was unconscious. Only a bastard would take advantage of such a situation.

Not a stitch of clothing covered her. Not that he needed his eyes to see in his mind what his hands felt. He had already spent more time than he should have visualizing her lithe figure. Naked in his arms. Another first for him. She was a job. One of countless Marshans he had dealt with over the years. Christophe Marshan's offspring had grown into quite the family line. And EFLA wanted them all dead. Those they could trace, anyway.

He had no business looking at her—lusting for her. Nothing had changed. He needed to get rid of Kit March and regain some measure of himself, of the man who never allowed his emotions to get the better of him. Especially when it came to the job. And Kit March, after all, was just a job.