Possession-Blood Ties 2 (23 page)

But that was, apparently, what she was there to stop him from doing. While he was content to doubt the goodness in his soul, she seemed determined to draw him back to more earthly matters. Sliding toward him, she tentatively pressed her mouth to his chest. When he didn’t object, she continued to kiss him, stroking her palms in a maddening path from his ribs to the waistband of his trousers. She lay back again, and he lay beside her, bracketing her body with his hands as he slid down to rest his face against her thigh. As a vampire, he would have cut the tender, white flesh at the bend of her knee to drink her blood. It had always been his favorite moment, looking up at their faces when they’d gotten their first taste of the pain he would inflict on them. As a human, making love to a human, he had no desire to cause her pain. He bent his head and licked the warm crease there. She jerked on the bed, her eyes wide. He couldn’t help his smile as he moved his mouth farther up her leg, with his hand on her firm, warm calf. The closer he drew to her

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sex, the faster her breathing became. When he knelt on the floor and pulled her to the edge of the bed—a little roughly, for it couldn’t be all gentle—and traced the seam between her legs with the pointed tip of his tongue, she arched off the mattress and clawed at his shoulders, gasping.

The taste and smell and warmth of her intoxicated him. Her fingers tangled in his hair, pulling him closer. He groaned against her slick folds and eased one finger into her. He hadn’t guessed wrong the first time he’d touched her intimately; she was a virgin. Though now she was open and willing, the thin barrier remained.

“I know it’s a sin,” she informed him with a moan. “But I want you to. I want you to do it.”

He laved his tongue over her engorged flesh, teasing her with his teeth until her body arched again and tensed, and she pulled his hair to the point of pain. The sound of her climax started as a low moan and rose in pitch to a keening wail, and her body trembled as she peaked. Before her pleasure could subside, he rose and spread her legs. Her eyes narrowed in trepidation, then flared with panic, and she lifted her hands as if to push him away. He wondered if she would ask him to stop. He knew he would, if she did so. But her arms dropped to her sides, hands fisting as though she braced herself for what was to come.

The heat and wetness of her enticed him. His body urged him to continue, and if this was the past, he would have obliged himself. He’d taken particular delight in the cruel deflowering of many a young girl then. But he didn’t want to see that pain in her eyes, the fear that she’d begun something she had no power to stop and no strength to finish. He had to work to unclench his jaw as he stroked the side of her face with his fingertips. “Are you sure?”

She hesitated a second, then wet her lips and nodded with a huge breath. Before she could think or wonder when the pain would come, he thrust into her. The barrier released with an unpleasant gush of wetness, and it was done. Beneath him, she stiffened. He expected her to scream, and she looked for a moment as though she’d expected to, as well. The sound never came.

“That wasn’t so bad,” she whispered with a small laugh. She lifted her hips against his, gasping when he slipped in deeper. “This isn’t so bad.”

They laughed together and he kissed her, his chest tight with happiness. When she moved beneath him again, the happiness was overshadowed by the urgent demands of his body. It didn’t take Mouse long to overcome her inexperience. She rocked against him, panted and clutched at his shoulders, and he closed his eyes to avoid the erotic sight and maintain some self-control.

He couldn’t escape her moans of pleasure, though, or the hot, wet grip of her surrounding him. He sought out her swollen bud and rubbed her with the pad of his thumb until her loud breaths and frantic, senseless pleas for release signaled the approaching culmination of her pleasure. He braced himself against the mattress and abandoned all thought of gentleness or care, driving into her so hard her breath exploded from her with every pump of his hips.

She did scream then, her nails biting into his arms where she gripped him. He let himself go, shuddering over her and inside of her. When he regained his senses, he withdrew, wincing at the friction of her grasping muscles against his painfully sensitized skin.

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They lay in silence for a long time, their legs hanging off the side of the bed. Cyrus studied her with detached interest. The moonlight from the small window above them dusted her skin with silver as he watched it grow rough with gooseflesh. How she could be chilled when his heart hammered as though he’d run a marathon, and sweat still poured from him, was a mystery.

“I’m cold,” she whispered sleepily, and he sat up to help her right herself on the bed. When he pulled the sheets over her, he saw her blood there, and closed his eyes. How had he ever been able to revel in the pain of others like her? How had he taken pleasure from taking life, when now he felt so guilty over a smear of virgin blood?

Those days of callous disregard were over. All that mattered now was the woman at his side, who was real and solid, and who loved him, even if she was afraid of him. Like a fool who repeatedly stuck his hand in the fire and was surprised by the burn, Cyrus once again trusted the feeble hope for happiness that grew in his soul. This time will be different, he assured himself. It would be different, because it had to be. In his weak, human state, he wouldn’t survive if it weren’t. But he was kidding himself. If he had the strength of a god, he wouldn’t survive losing her.

Though sunrise loomed pink on the horizon, Max gave Dahlia the benefit of the doubt and decided to check one last cemetery. The first two had turned up only sleeping homeless people and thrill-seeking teenagers. This close to dawn, both types would have moved on. He pulled the car to a stop at the closed iron gate and ignored the scheduled visiting hours posted beside it as he climbed the stone wall. The early morning dew made the ascent slippery and wet. When he landed, his T-shirt stuck to him and his jeans were uncomfortably chilled against his thighs. “Nathan, if you are here, I’m going to kill you.”

Not that he wanted to see Nathan.

Since the day they’d spared his life, Max had made it a rule never to cross the Movement. Sure, he’d been less than diligent when tracking quarry sometimes, but there was a big difference between missing the opportunity and coming face-to-face with it, only to let it run off scot-free.

No pun intended.

Two paths curved in opposite directions around a hill dotted with leaning, broken monuments. Elaborate mausoleums lined the outside edges of the paths, marble houses that reeked of death so strongly Max couldn’t believe a human couldn’t smell it. He started up one path, determined to get his patrol over with before he wound up with a terminal case of sunburn. Then he caught the whiff of something sinister on the air. At first, he’d thought it was merely the smell of another body, probably another of Nathan’s victims. Then he realized the copper scent had a warm, living edge to it, and he tore off in the direction of the blood.

The first thing he saw was her leg stretching past the end of one ivy-covered crypt. The black leather boot on her foot was muddy and torn, as though the fight had been long and rough. A rip in her pant leg showed a bloody gash from knee to ankle, laid open so wide the shocking white of bone showed through.

The sight was enough to make bile rise in his throat. When she’d attacked him outside the coffee shop, she’d seemed invincible. Now, Bella had been reduced to a broken heap of

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ruined parts.

Whoever had done it was still there, breathing heavily, just out of sight. Max tore around the corner of the crypt and stopped dead in his tracks. It took him a moment to recognize the monster looming over her was Nathan. When the sick comprehension dawned, Max couldn’t move to draw his weapon. The creature that used to be his best friend turned, face bloody from feeding, and snarled at him. Instead of charging, though, it looked at the lightening sky and took off, leaping to the top of a mausoleum, then disappearing behind it.

Max put his hands on the lip of the stone, preparing to chase after the beast, then heard Bella moan. If he left her where she was, someone might find her. The caretaker would probably be in to open the gate and would likely have a look around to make sure there hadn’t been any shenanigans overnight. But Max didn’t know anything about werewolves, and couldn’t be sure she would survive that long without help. Fuck her. She tried to kill you, he reminded himself. If she’s dead, she’s one less thing to worry about.

But he didn’t work that way. He wished he did.

With sunrise just minutes away, he had no time to hunt for Nathan. To do so would probably only get them both killed. And werewolf or not, Bella was a fellow Movement assassin. He couldn’t let her die.

Cursing her stupidity good and loud so she could hear it even if she’d already shrugged her mortal coil, he bent and lifted her limp body in his arms. “You better pray Nathan’s got a primo fucking first aid kit back at the apartment, or you’re in real trouble, lady.”

It took some maneuvering to get her over the wall without breaking her neck, but the classic fireman’s carry came through in the pinch. Max wrestled her into the car and positioned her head against the window so she would appear to be sleeping and not mortally wounded. “If you bleed on the seat, you’re off my Christmas card list.”

Somewhere in the cemetery, his assignment was escaping. He looked from the jagged stones at the top of the hill to the dying woman in the seat beside him and swore. With a final, vehement curse, he pounded the steering wheel and sped away.
14

The Past Comes Back To Haunt You

M arch’s private rooms were at the back of the house. She led me to a huge conservatory, a glass bubble filled with verdant plant life and flowering trees. The floor, an intricate mosaic of tiny tiles, wound in paths around beds of soil. The snaking trails converged in the center of the room, where water trickled down the face of a craggy boulder that nearly reached the ceiling. In front of the impressive fixture, a striking red Shinto gate stood watch over an elaborately set tea service.

March indicated I should sit at the delicate, wrought-iron table, and despite my simmering anger, I did so. “That’s an aggressively spiritual symbol you have there, considering what you are.”

“What, a vampire can’t be spiritual?” She looked astonished in a worldly way, a contradiction that didn’t surprise me. The woman was as hard to read as a book written backward. “The Shinto tradition is concerned mainly with the spiritual affairs of the living. As I am eternally living, I don’t see the harm in believing something.”

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“That’s not what I meant,” I explained as she poured blood from a Victorian-style teapot.

“I thought it was an overtly spiritual thing for you to have, considering you’re a vampire pimp who sneaks up on people to murder them in their sleep.”

She grimaced, a smoke-roughened laugh escaping her bared teeth. “Now, why did you have to use that word? It’s such a nasty label for what I do.”

“What about ‘kidnapping’ or ‘false imprisonment’? How do those suit you?” I made no attempt to hide my suspicion as I refused the blood she offered me. She’d held me hostage—granted, I couldn’t have gone anywhere during the daylight, anyway—and tried to kill me. Just because she’d decided to offer me breakfast instead didn’t mean I’d roll over and we’d become bestest friends.

As crazy and paranoid as it seemed—and it did seem that way to me, after I’d applied said paranoia to every person I’d seen on this trip, from tollbooth operators to truck stop waitresses—I couldn’t help but suspect she knew what I was up to in the desert. I couldn’t tell from her Cheshire Cat smile if she really did know or if she’d just picked up on my discomfort. “Well, we can just put all that behind us. Your sire is the fledgling of my sire, after all. That makes us practically family.”

I glared at her. “Practically. Except Cyrus isn’t my sire anymore.” I hesitated.

“He’s…dead.”

“Is he now?” She poured some blood for herself and sipped it, her eyes never leaving my face. When she finished, she dabbed her lips with her linen napkin, leaving dainty spots of blood on it. “Isn’t that sad? You’re an orphan.”

I thought of Nathan, and the word orphan imprinted on my brain like a searing brand. “I’m not. Even if I was, I wouldn’t count the Soul Eater as my next of kin.”

“You know, I’ve never liked that name. It’s so confrontational. And it makes it sound like he’s doing something wrong.”

She lit up a cigarette, every movement as casual as if we were discussing the weather.

“You’ve got to be kidding me.” I was reaching the frayed edges of my patience. “He kills vampires for food!”

“You kill people for food. What’s the difference?” The practiced naiveté with which she posed the question made me stumble over my answer.

And that hesitation told her everything she needed to know: I didn’t kill for blood. In her eyes, that labeled me weak. Prey.

“No matter how I feed, I still have ties to the Soul Eater,” I said quickly.

“So do I.” She took a long draw off her cigarette and smiled. “And I know he can’t stomach your kind. Sniveling cowards who deny their true nature.”

I couldn’t argue with her. If the Soul Eater had his way, vampires would be more far more aggressive about their status as top of the food chain.

“Did you know who I was when I came here?” It seemed too fortuitous that Byron had led me to this place, knowing my destination.

She shrugged and flicked the ashes off her cigarette into her saucer. “A friend called and mentioned that a person of interest was going to show up.”