The Bloodline War (17 page)

A challenging glint entered her eyes, and then she…

Ah, shit.

She leaned across the table and yanked the peanut dish back, her ponytail
swishing
forward across her cheek, sending her scent
swishing
at him.
You’re not going to beat me
, was the obvious message, but he couldn’t give an unholy fuck. He was too busy trying not to bulldoze across the table, latch his fangs onto her neck, and ram another part of himself deep inside her.

Jesus, her fragrance had him engulfed in something between excruciating pain and mind-numbing ecstasy. His mouth watered, his gums feeling like they were bulging as a thousand pinpricks of sensation tingled along his skin and detonated a firecracker in his belly. He turned his head aside to gulp in a quick breath. It didn’t help much.

She rooted around the dish for another peanut. “So why do you like old movies?”

“You’re a real fucking whack job,” he growled, “you know that, lady?”

Her brows leapt high for a second in surprise, and then a laugh came out of her, the sound and her accompanying smile hitting his solar plexus with a
whomp
.

He shifted in the booth, his muscles tense and screaming for some kind of action. Somewhere in the vague recesses of his mind he registered that women generally didn’t smile at him. Most were pretty good at reading his
stay back, dangerous animal
sign.

Her lips twisted. “I suppose it wouldn’t surprise you to hear I’ve been called worse?”

“Hag?” He drawled the suggestion. “Nagging shrew?”

Her eyes danced with her humor.

He closed his hand into a fist around his Budweiser bottle, his heart banging in his chest. Either it was the lighting or his extra-honed senses, but her eyes seemed impossibly blue tonight.

“Feel better now?” she asked wryly.

He smiled savagely. “Much.”

“Wow, look at that.” Her brows popped up. “The man has teeth, and a good-looking set, too.”

He snapped the smile off his face as fire blazed into his cheeks, his stomach doing some sort of weird back flip.

“I mean, don’t go crazy on me or anything. I still think you’re a—”

“Thomal’s back,” he clipped out, jerking his chin at the bar.

She glanced over her shoulder. “He’s getting our drinks.” She went back to the peanut dish and asked again, “So why do you like old movies?”

“I don’t know,” he retorted mulishly. Evidently, he was still doing the two-year-old thing.

She went on searching for an acceptable peanut. “Yes, you do.”

He scowled down at the top of her head. “Other people eat those nuts, you know.”

“See how I’m ignoring your crabbiness, Jaċken?” She perkily popped a denuded nut into her mouth. “Are you noticing that?”

He glared at her throat, this time without an eye toward biting it. Maybe he could just squeeze until she shut that gaping maw of hers and not kill her entirely.

She exhaled a long sigh. “Don’t make me be a whack job again.”

“Did you ever stop?” Ho,
that
put the challenging light right back into her eyes, and as soon as he saw it, he caved, to his utter shock, like a total lightweight. “I just like that everything was simpler back then, all right.
Jesus
.” He gave his shoulders a tight shrug. “I like the happy endings.” They were the only ones he’d ever get.

“Ah.” She braced an elbow on the table and propped her chin on her hand, her gaze poignant. “Yes, I like that part, too.”

He fidgeted, the tender look in her eyes burrowing into his newly formed soft spot. He glanced around the bar for a warrior. He needed someone to beat some Man back into him, like fucking quick. No worries: any minute, Thomal would probably step up to do the job.

“I’ve probably seen all of Katherine Hepburn’s films three times.” Straightening, she stirred her martini with the toothpick that was speared through her olives. “Of course, that was before I started on a steady diet of Matthew McConaughey movies.”

He jerked his eyebrows up in surprise. “You’re kidding me.”

“No.” She chuckled. “Why not? He’s gorgeous.”

“The guy’s
pretty
.” He snorted. “He might as well be a girl.”

“Oh, my God, I can’t believe you just said that. Have you taken a look around here, lately, mister? The men in this town give new meaning to the concept of beautiful. There’s not one person here, in fact, man or woman, who isn’t some level of good-looking, at least not that I’ve seen.” She
clink-clinked
her toothpick against the rim of her glass. “It’s kind of spooky, actually.”

“
Actually
,” he returned, “it’s genetics, Doctor, or natural selection, if you prefer. Vârcolac are attractive because they have to be in order to survive.” The muscles in his thighs clenched tight as he watched her lean forward to pluck an olive off the toothpick with her teeth. “We’re a breed of human who has to take in blood for sustenance. So Mother Nature was generous enough to give our species the kinds of faces and forms that would make it easy to seduce a host into surrendering a vein.”

She stopped chewing her olive and swallowed. “Dr. Jess said Vârcolac either feed on a bonded mate or a donor, neither of whom needs a whole lot of seducing.”

Well, bowl him over with a feather, she knew something about their breed now. He’d have given her a solid month before she would’ve opened her mind to that kind of information. “It wasn’t always that way. The first Vârcolac could take blood for nourishment without forming a permanent bond, which allowed them to pursue multiple sources. You can pick up on that old way of being if you pay attention around here: Pure-bred’s have a predatory edge to them because they used to hunt, whereas the Mixed-blood Dragons, who came later, are the charmers.”

“Ah….” She sat back, and her lips twitched. “And which one are you?”

He took a hard swig of his beer, an irrational anger gusting over him. The sparkle in her eyes and the teasing tone of her voice were bad enough, like some kind of damned flirtation, but her comment was also a complete face-shove into exactly why he could never have her. Or any woman.

“Actually,” he sneered, “I’m a genetic mutation, Doctor, if you really want to know, not entirely Vârcolac, not quite human, but a creature in every sense of the word.” He leaned toward her, jutting his jaw aggressively. “I’m a beast who hovers all of about two inches away from the edge of pure evil and the
last
thing you should be sitting your pretty little hinie across from.” He eased back, exhaling through tight lips. “You know, for someone who’s probably real smart about most things in life, you have your head particularly far up your ass about staying away from me. See my eyes, lady? They’re pure black. Don’t you think that ought to tell you something?”

She bit another olive off her toothpick and chewed…chewed and chewed and stared at him with such casual indifference that he wanted to grab her by the shoulders and shake her until her head tumbled off her neck. What did it take to get rid of this woman?

“Are you trying to scare me, Jaċken? Because if you are, you’re going to have to come up with something better than that.” She lifted a shoulder. “So you’re a freak. So what? You’re the one who has his head up his ass if you think you’ve got the market cornered on that.” She polished off her drink, then tossed the toothpick into her empty martini glass with a sharp
tink
. “I feel like just as much of a freak as you do, pal, so you can take your holier-than-thou attitude and stuff it.” Snatching up her purse, Toni came abruptly to her feet. “But, hey, you want me to keep my hinie away from you? No problem. Consider me
gone
.”

“Yo, what’s up?” Nỵko drew up at the table, as nonchalant as if it was an everyday occurrence to find Jaċken chitchatting with a woman.

“Your brother’s a psychotic piece of bird crap, that’s what.”

“Oh, well….” Bobbing his head, Nỵko slid his hands into his pockets.

Toni waved at Thomal just as the blond warrior turned from the bar with a drink in each hand, martini in one, draft beer in the other, and headed back to him.

Nỵko stood in place for a second, then scooted into the booth, quietly taking a sip of his beer.

Jaċken just sat there, his whole body humming as if any minute it would shatter into a thousand pieces. He cleared his throat. “Where’s Shọn?”

“Back in his room at the mansion. I told him we’d watch a DVD with him. He said any flick but one of yours.” Nỵko moved his beer bottle around in its wet ring. “You okay?”

“Sure. Why not.” Lungs tight, Jaċken stared a hole straight through the top of the table. He was so screwed up. Now that he’d finally managed to get rid of Toni, he only wanted her to
come back
. He pressed his eyes closed as a round of boisterous laughter rang out from over by the pool table. Don’t look.

But he did.

The humming inside him instantly shut off, replaced by a prickly tension that made him feel like his whole body was wrapped in barbed wire. Over by the pool table, Toni was holding Thomal by the hand and pulling him toward the back door, her beautiful eyes sparkling at
him
now. Jaċken clenched his jaw so hard, the muscles in his face throbbed. Whatever low words Toni was saying to Thomal had the man nearly stomping a boot mark on his tongue.

Jaċken slugged back the rest of his beer as the two blondes disappeared out the back door. It was only by the narrowest margin of control that he didn’t throw back his head and howl until the roof caved in.

It wouldn’t take long for a horny little shit like Thomal to crowd Toni back up against Garwald’s outside wall and start kissing a path up her throat, tasting the softness of her flesh, succumbing to the sweet insanity of her scent. His fangs would unsheathe from the force of his desire, and from there, it’d only take a few whispered words to convince Toni to moan, yes. Next would come the sweet puncture of a vein, then the wash of her blood into Thomal’s mouth and down his throat, the intoxicating liquid entering his body like living and breathing warmth, charging up every atom in his body with strength and energy, turning him into a man—a
complete
one, at last.

Then Thomal would take her, pushing inside her body to feel her wet heat close around him, savoring the hot, aroused cadence of her breathing in his ears and the sting of her fingernails at his back. He’d fill her womb with his seed, marvel at her belly growing with his child, cuddle up on a couch with her after dinner to watch
The African Queen
. Or not watch it, as they once again found themselves unable to keep their hands off each other.

But most of all, Thomal’s exalted status as Toni’s bonded mate would give him the right to ask her the name of her father so that he could hunt down the bastard and go Postal on his ass.

Lurching back in his booth, Jaċken exhaled a raw, cursing breath. He looked across the expanse of table at Nỵko. “Fuck it,” he said quietly. “I’m not okay.”

“Yeah, I know,” Nỵko said simply.

“What…?” The word got stuck halfway up his throat and he had to start again. “What am I going to do?”

Nỵko shook his head. “Don’t worry about it, Jaċken. It’ll get better once she’s mated. Her scent won’t be all over the place, making you crazy.”

Yeah
…. But no. It was way more than just her scent.
She
had him tied up in knots, smart-mouthed, pain-in-the-ass
her
, and seeing her get hooked up with another guy would just do a whole lot of making it worse. He propped his elbows on the table and grabbed his temples between his hands. He really needed to stop this train wreck before he fell completely in love with—

His thoughts jerked to a halt as his gaze fell on the two Ibuprofen Toni had given him, still on the table. His heart wrenched so hard that his eyes actually burned. “I need to get the hell out of here, Nỵko. Let’s head back to the—”

Thomal stumbled up to their table, his face red and sweat-misted, a hand clutching his belly low down. “Toni just kneed me in the balls,” he gasped out, “and ran off.”

Jaċken leapt to his feet. “Damn it, what kind of pantywaist are you, Costache?”

“She
really
distracted me, okay.”

Jaċken held up a hand to stop any more of
that
shit from coming out of Thomal’s mouth. “Just find her,” he snapped. He turned and jogged for the door, his stomach twisting into a hard knot of worry. If Toni somehow made it to The Outer Edge and became another Gwyn Billaud, he’d never forgive himself for driving her away.

Chapter Eighteen

Toni darted in and out of the buildings along Main Street, keeping close to the shadows as she headed for the fork at the end of the road. The left fork. Breathing heavily, she shot into the low tunnel, the walls closing in around her. Dark, dank, slime climbing the walls, water drip-dripping steadily down slick rock. A prickle of unease touched her nape. Had she actually wanted the town of Ţărână to appear freakier in order to fit better into her definition of what a “vampire” lair should look like?
Well, be careful what you wish for
.

Here
was a cave, and one that ranked about a million on the creep-o-meter.

She loped along for about three hundred yards, then came to a gasping halt at the end of the tunnel. Just like in the right fork, the cave opened into a large cavern of buildings, although this part of the town was like…
Jesus!
It looked like The Projects times a Third World Country times…she didn’t know what—a scene out of
Nightmare on Elm Street
,
Friday the Thirteenth, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
or any one of the choicer slasher films her brother had dragged her to see all those years ago.

Low, misshapen buildings were jammed cheek-to-jowl next to one another in the center of a u-shaped cut out of rock. Some were boarded up and many were dark. A few showed signs of life in the form of a bulb sputtering in a window, the dim light casting eerie, writhing shadows across the cave floor and up the lumpy walls. A pit of burping mud off to the left added a fitting sulfuric odor to the scene, though the worst smell was the out-and-out human stink.