Last Vamp Standing (4 page)

Oh yeah, this was going to spark adrenaline all right.

Once in range, Slimeball slammed a heavy fist into Dante’s stomach, a massive swing that rounded the world before it hit its target. Dante let the first hit strike true to jumpstart his system. Like calling the cows in for dinner, if Dante let this sucker ring his bell a jab or two, the adrenaline would fire more quickly and he could get the hell out of here.

But Slimeball wanted a show. He danced around clumsily, his fists clenched in front of his chin like he was in a damned movie.

Beyond the voices in Dante’s head melting together into a screaming hodgepodge of dirty deeds, curses and hell fire, he heard the skin-crawling sound of an audience. Of drunken “Ooh’s” and women’s screams.

Dante put his hands to his sides, welcoming the pain.

“Aww, what?” Slimeball teased, jabbing a few ghost punches toward Dante’s chin. “You can run your mouth but not your hands, is that it?”

Dante couldn’t help it. He shot off a quick right-left combo to Slimeball’s nose. Slimeball staggered back, clutching at his face as blood oozed over his lips.

“That one’s gonna cost you,” he mumbled.

That’s exactly what Dante hoped for.

Slimeball charged. Slugged Dante in the stomach, bowling him over. Then he upper-cut Dante to the chin, slinging him back.

The tiniest jolt of adrenaline sang through Dante’s veins. He couldn’t help it; he smiled.

“You think that’s funny?” Slimeball kneed him in the gut, dropping Dante to the floor. “I’ll show you funny.”

He stepped back and raised his leg, aiming to front-kick Dante dead in the face. But Dante already had what he needed. The knee to the abs had already punched the wind from Dante’s lungs and sent sheets of adrenaline whipping through his arms and legs.

Before Slimeball could connect his boot to Dante’s nose, his voices receded. His hunger dialed back. As Slimeball’s foot came within reach, Dante snatched his ankle mid-air and twisted, sending him careening to the deck. Dante jumped to a crouch and struck Slimeball hard and true. Right to his temple. Slimeball’s head snapped back, hitting the floor as his eyes rolled back.

Silence.

Sweet, blissful silence.

Dante sighed and stood, arching his back. Although he wasn’t satiated completely, the voices were gone.

The night was a success. Almost.

Slimeball’s date was plastered against the wall where the table had been. Her eyes were wide and her arms folded over her chest as if a great chill had come over her. Dante searched the club for bouncers. Surely they were on their way to escort him out.

“You all right?” he asked, meeting her gaze.

She shook her head. “I don’t know, I don’t think I’m supposed to be here, I—I should probably go home.”

She’d sobered up quickly, Dante realized, noting that the haze that had coated her eyes was gone.

“Everything’s going to be fine now,” Dante said, extending his hand. “Come on, I’ll call you a cab.”

As she took his hand, Dante had the urge to tell her it’d be more than all right. She might’ve been going home confused and alone, but at least her soul was intact. If Dante had let himself do what he’d come here to do, she might’ve left with more evil tendencies than she’d come with.

It had happened before.

And if it wasn’t for Slimeball’s willingness to fight, feeding Dante’s hunger the only other way he knew how, it might’ve happened again.

Though he didn’t know what made him think of it, Dante reached beneath the sleeve of his coat and stroked the soft length of Ariana’s ribbon.

Chapter Three

“After thousands of years, the mark we’ve been waiting for has finally appeared. Thanks to a Watcher’s offer to step forward and capture the mark with his own hands, we will soon be freed from the burden of our sins!”

W
ATCHER
A
RCHIVE, UPDATE

“W
HAT’D THE
P
RIMUS
say?” Echo wound through the trees lining the mud pit, carefully planting his trunk-sized boots on solid ground before transferring his weight. It was easy to twist an ankle on the uneven earth. They’d both done it before, and it stung like hell. “He pissed or what?”

“No, not pissed,” Ariana said, fanning out a heavy wool blanket in the center of the projection ring. She knew Echo would have a gazillion questions about her meeting with the Primus, so she’d spent the day in her room, steering clear of Echo until tonight. Echo was her friend, but he was damn annoying when his questions got rolling. “He ordered me back to the black market to finish the mission. I have to bring back a newly transitioned elder with me this time—one who is still trying to figure out his or her maware. No excuses.”

Not that she considered what happened the previous night an excuse. There was no way she could’ve known her vamp was going to unleash hell on the black market and teleport her out of there.

And why did she always refer to him as
her vamp
when he sprang into her mind? Frowning, Ariana pinched her bottom lip between her teeth.

He wasn’t hers. He’d simply touched her, feathered chills across her skin and lit fireworks in her stomach. He’d made her pause, forgetting her mission, when it was so clearly cemented in her mind. And he’d pulled her in, made her body go weak like putty and her mind seize to stone.

That’s all . . .

It wasn’t like she had any claim to him.

She doubted anyone did. His energy was powerful and radiating. Too consuming. Ariana bet no woman could get close to the fire burning behind his eyes without getting burned. Not that she would’ve wanted to be that woman, testing his limits, riling those flames. Nope, no way.

She’d never see him again anyway.

“What you waitin’ for?” Echo asked, jarring her.

“I don’t know.” Ariana straightened her aching back and took a good look around. The forest surrounding Black Moon looked as it always did. Thick fir trees smelled of sap and pine. Tiny clearings had been hollowed out between towering firs from projections of years passed.

It felt oddly hollow tonight. Maybe she was comparing it to the last time she stood here, with her vamp towering over her. There had been little room to breathe. Her heart had constricted as he’d pressed her against the tree.

That tree
—the fir looming behind Echo’s shoulder. Heat flashed across her skin, remembering the feel of her vamp’s knee rubbing between her thighs as he pinned her.

She shook her head, letting thoughts of him fall from her mind like rain—one trickling memory at a time. “Something doesn’t feel right.”

“Feel fine to me.”

“It’s quiet,” she said, then listened to utter, ear-tingling nothing. On the loneliest, quietist night, something could always be heard. Even if it was the pounding of her heart in her ears.

Everything stilled.

“Quiet is good, no?” Echo asked, cocking a bushy brow.

“Yeah, but it’s too quiet.”

No birds’ wings fluttered in the canopy above her head. No crickets chirped midnight songs.

Planting her hands on the small of her back for a good pre-projection stretch, Ariana looked up. Paused. The crescent moon was high in the sky, tilting toward Orion’s belt. Orion was a warrior—the greatest—and the moon a reflective rock, guiding the ways of their haven.

What did it mean that the moon’s corner edge pointed directly to the hilt of Orion’s sword? A fighter in their midst? A war on the horizon?

Something inside Ariana stirred as she kneeled on the blanket, finally peeling her eyes off the night sky. She shook off the chill creeping into her bones. The tickle shimmering across her skin was nothing but her fear of the dark that her eyes couldn’t penetrate. Had to be. Their haven had been safe. It’d been concealed from the rest of the world for hundreds of years. It wasn’t about to change now. No warriors could find Black Moon. No war could reach their walls.

Couldn’t . . . wouldn’t happen.

Her vamp had found Black Moon, but that was entirely her fault and had nothing to do with the stars. Besides, the only war he brought was the struggle within her. She couldn’t stop thinking about him—his musky, woodsy scent that made her want to breathe in deep, the sharp cut of his jaw she wanted to brush her fingers along, those glowing yellow eyes she wanted to stare into on a dark night like this—no matter how she tried.

And damn it, there she went again.

Echo must’ve noticed her hesitation. “I won’t go nowhere, Ari. Got my word on that this time.” He plopped his massive body on a trunk inches outside the ring and scraped clods of mud off his boots. “No nymph pull me away from you again.”

She met the black depths of his eyes, trying not to notice how shallow they were. “I hope your word is worth more now than it was last night.”

“Not you think about a thing.” He tossed a mass of red dreads over his shoulder and stroked the silver shaft of a knife on his belt. “Someone piggybacks this time and I got ’em.”

If they had a repeat of last night, she’d have to seriously rethink her trajectory.

Looking over her shoulder, through the trunks of firs surrounding the pit, past Echo’s looming, protective shadow, Ariana couldn’t lose the feeling someone was watching her. Watching them.

She wondered how much the nymph saw last night. If she got wind of what Ariana was doing, what she could bring back with her if she wanted to, Ariana would be a valuable trading tool.

“You feeling someone followed us here?” Echo asked, his voice as thick as the brush at his feet. “You got that feeling last time, you remember? Ain’t nothin’ but the wind in the trees and the hairs on your neck. No one here but you and me.”

“Yeah,” she said on a sigh. What did it mean that she wanted someone to be there—someone with the power to seduce her in a few heated minutes? “If you say so, Echo.”

No one followed them, Ariana assured herself.

They’d been careful, covering their steps every inch of the way, hadn’t they? They’d trudged a new path from Black Moon to the pit as they always did. Sure, the well-trodden dirt road that wound through the forest might’ve earned her robe fewer mud stains, but Watchers had been known to travel that path to other, more sacred parts of the forest. The last thing they needed was some curious Watcher wondering what they were doing out of Black Moon.

Someone who would follow them to the pit and find her body vacant and defenseless.

Ariana had never had a problem with someone following them in the past, but thanks to her recent experience she figured it was better to be safe than sorry.

Echo cleared his throat a little too awkwardly and paused. Like he meant to say something. Ariana craned her neck and peered over her shoulder.

“Something on your mind?” She could barely make out the robust curve of his nose and the hard line of his jaw in the dark.

He shook his head—Echo had to know now wasn’t the time, that she couldn’t stay in the ring much longer than necessary—but spoke anyway. “I never ask how you do it. You know, how the thing you do work. You go away, you lie there like you ain’t alive, you come back with someone else. How is it you be in two places at once? Your body here, your body there?”

Ariana faced forward again and shifted her weight over her knees. “It’s the maware that was bestowed upon me when I transitioned into an elder. I can’t explain how it works. It just does.”

“No,” he said quietly, his voice a distant rumble. “I mean, when you go where you go, are you for real . . . or is the you that’s lying here for real?”

It never occurred to her that he’d wonder about where she went when she projected from this place. He’d never asked before. She’d figured he didn’t care. As long as he did his job and kept his mouth shut about where they went and why, nothing else mattered.

Thinking about how little time they had, Ariana tried to put it as clearly as she could. “Once I project from here, it’s like a picture of me shows up somewhere else. Only it’s a picture that can walk and talk and touch like everyone else.”

“Like one of those creepy wax statues that look real?”

“Kind of.” She’d never seen a wax figure walk and talk, but whatever.

“How long it last?” He kicked at a low-hanging branch and snapped it clean off. “You stay out there forever if you wanna?”

She scratched at her leg, where the mud from her robe was starting to seep to her thighs. Her blood was already starting to sizzle in her veins, firing her muscles and weakening her knees. Her body had begun to anticipate the projection, gearing up for the supernatural event, before she willed it. The mark on her forearm buzzed with warmth. She wondered if it’d ever fill in completely and what form it would take.

“Ever watch one of those old movies, Echo? The black and white ones with the flickering images?”

He nodded and looked up, his red hair flopping in his face.

“After a while my projection begins to feel like that. Like a flickering film that starts in my chest and rolls through my body. That’s when it’s my cue to leave. Whomever I touch when that moment comes returns to the pit with me.”

“But you always tell me how much time to expect before you go. How you know?”

His sudden interest was starting to bother her more than the wet itchiness of her robe. “I get an idea of the strength of the projection right before I fade out. Each time is different. Sometimes I have hours. Sometimes all night.” She supposed it depended on how strong she felt. Or how confident. Or the circumstances surrounding the projection.

“You get a feelin’ tonight?”

“Not yet.” She
really
didn’t like the fact that her Primus had ordered her to return before she was ready. Not one bit. As much as she hoped the disdain wouldn’t affect her projection or her mission to bring back an elder from the market, she couldn’t guarantee it.

“Better get started,” Ariana said as she settled on her side. Resting her head in the crook of her arm, she pulled her knees to her chest. As her weight relaxed into the blanket, the dampness of the ground soaked through the fabric, chilling her. She closed her eyes and focused on her breathing, slow and deep. Muscles relaxed. Joints jellied. Her mind began to pull away from her body.

“Tonight won’t be long,” she whispered as a branch crackled deep in the forest. “Thirty minutes . . . an hour at most.” Her voice didn’t even sound like her own anymore. It was high-pitched and whiny. Too soft. The way it probably sounded to everyone else.

“Everything gonna be okay,” she heard Echo say as if through a tunnel, far, far away. Her mind slipped further from her body, separating until she felt as if she were hovering over the mud pit; no longer lying within it. His voice was deep, muffled underwater. “No matter what, where you go, things be okay.”

That’s what she was counting on.

But as she faded out of Black Moon’s range, letting tingly blankets of sleep cascade over her arms and legs, another voice rang through her ears. It was masculine, loud, and commanding. Authoritative. Another, very dominant, presence hovered outside the circle.

Ariana forced her racing heart to slow. Stress would only make the impending projection weaker, and that’s not what she needed when headed into the bowels of the black market.

Echo was her Watcher. He’d protect her. He was armed.

If the intruder was someone who meant to harm her, Echo’d take care of it. He was a beast. Able to take care of business with a massive swing of his arm. If it was another nymph wanting to suck off of Black Moon’s healing powers, he’d tell her to scat. At least that’s what Ariana hoped.

It was too late to come back to her body anyway. Too late for her to worry about it. She’d already accepted the projection whole-heartedly. She was on her way to the elder black market on the Embarcadero. She could almost taste the salt on the sea breeze.

“Now get her body off the ground, Echo,” the stranger ordered much too calmly, rattling Ariana’s brain like a thunderclap.

What the hell? They know each other?

“Yes, sir,” Echo answered dutifully.

No! No! No!

“Good man.”

Damn it! Go back! I want to go back!

Ariana’s mind thrashed helplessly, knowing there was nothing she could do if they wanted to rape her, kill her, or drag her away and bury her alive beneath a goddamn fir tree. All she had left was the astral-projection of her endangered self with no idea how long the projection would last or where she’d be when she finally snapped back to her body.

She was going to
kill
Echo.

If he didn’t kill her first.