What Happens in Vegas...After Dark (9 page)

Focusing on his involvement with Jada, I kept my lips from smiling back. “I’ve been thinking about Jada.”

Losing his smile, he sat bolt upright. “What about?”

“I’m surprised you don’t remember her death. I couldn’t stop thinking about her long enough to fal asleep last night, so I went online and I found some old news threads on her apartment fire. Ladder 19 was one of the crews that responded to the blaze.”

He looked thoughtful for a few seconds before glancing away with a shrug. “I probably had the day off.”

Damn, I didn’t want Ryan’s denial. But that he was giving it to me was the answer I needed. He was a fraud. A smooth player who, if he cared at all, would have the balls to trust me with the truth as fully as he claimed he did with his body.

For the sake of my fiercely beating heart, I pinned him with an expectant look and gave him one more chance. “Did you?”

A hundred different responses raced through his eyes. Was the truth in there? I couldn’t tel . I could only hear the detached tone of his voice as he gave a resolute nod and said,

“I’m sure that I did.”

Fuck. Fuck, and yet, I should have expected no less.

Every bit of the hatred I’d lost for him the last weeks resurged as an acidic burning in my belly that quickly ate its way outward. That he could act so aloof about Jada’s death…

it proved him the bastard I’d always known. Coldhearted and deserving of a death just as agonizing as hers had been.

Flashing a supreme smile even as my belly quivered with loathing, I went down on my knees in front of him and took his cock in hand. A dose of mental stimulation had his shaft rousing to hardness in seconds.

I bent to swipe my tongue across the pre-cum oozing at the tip. Despising how much I stil loved his taste, I feigned an eager grin. “What do you say to a welcome-to-the-morning blow job?”

“I could use more sleep first.”

Now that he mentioned it, he did look tired. Too bad for him I no longer gave a shit.

“Just shut up and enjoy the entertainment, Cock.”

Hitting him with a heavy shot of seduction, I wrapped my lips around his dick and took it deep into my mouth. I licked at his rod as my lips worked up and down the steely length. All the while, I concentrated on stealing his strength.

Ryan had done incredibly well at resisting my attempts to drain his energy and take over his mind the last while. But I knew now that was only because I hadn’t been trying hard enough. I’d wanted to like him. Maybe I’d even wanted to love him to the point of rings and vows and, one day, kids, regardless that our progeny would have been far less powerful Damphir for their half-human blood.

Now, my illusions of love, lust and offspring burst.

Now, I turned every ounce of my power on him with the plans to render him unconscious and then take him to the one place on Earth I could count on both my powers being at their strongest and an audience eager to view the demise of a mortal with bloodstained hands and a vicious heart.

Ryan

“Open your eyes, Ryan.”

Though I couldn’t recall closing my eyes, or for that matter fal ing asleep, Deitre’s sultry voice taunted from the fringes of my subconscious. There was also pain there. Too damned much pain. And exhaustion.

My pulse beating slow and thready, I shut out the ache to open my eyes. The lids wouldn’t budge. I couldn’t lift my hands, either. Solid weight trapped my lower half in place, and I wasn’t even sure if I could move a muscle.

“Open your goddamned eyes!” she barked this time.

Like they were controlled by some external force, my eyes snapped open. Hurt, raw and consuming, ratcheted through my head and along my prone body. Blurred faces swam into view against a backdrop of semidarkness. Deitre’s face hovered a foot or so above me. Dozens of others registered past the smog that could be a film covering my stinging eyes as easily as a fog of humidity. I couldn’t make the faces out down to the detail, between the darkness and that film, but what I could see resembled a hodgepodge of the impossible.

Some misshapen, ears with points instead of curves and multiple eyes where there should have been a lone one. Some covered with dark, coarse hair that resembled that of a wolf. Some pale green to the extent I expected to see Frankenstein scars covering their temple and plugs sticking out of their neck.

All were faces I’d only seen in movies or imagined in my worst nightmares.

I had to be dreaming. Some twisted nightmare of a dream that was a side effect of letting Deitre shove that butt plug up my ass. Any moment now I would wake. She would be sitting on the living-room floor, naked and with her thighs spread to reveal her slick sex, looking hotter than sin and ready to climb onto the couch and do me.

I had no energy to do her. Would she let me off the hook this time?

“There is no hook!” The words snapped out from above me.

With effort and a resulting stab of hurt in my temple, I pulled my gaze from the creatures around me to Deitre’s face stil hovering a foot away. Now, it was more than her face, though. Her entire nude body was there, those gorgeous tits on ful display and her hot, toned thighs straddling my upper legs and registering as the weight that trapped my lower half in place.

A devilishly wicked smile curved her lips as she took my cock in hand. My naked cock.

My hard cock.

Yeah, this had to be a dream. I could never feel such intense pain and fatigue and still have an erection bucking for more than just her fingers.

Her smile intensified with every fervent stroke and each of my shaft’s eager pumps.

The carnal edge vanished completely then, and it seemed only evil turned up her glistening, cherry-red lips.

“You’re not dreaming,” she voiced tauntingly, the wickedness in her smile reflected in her hostile tone, the Southern seduction missing in action. “This is happening. All of this is happening.”

What was “all” supposed to entail?

Hel , it didn’t matter. Neither did my exhaustion nor the pain. I had to be seconds away from succumbing to alertness.

Waiting out my escape from a bizarrely hellish slumber, I turned my head to the right and assessed my surroundings again. More pain sizzled through my neck with the move.

Only, Christ, this wasn’t just pain. This felt like someone had driven a set of nails through my jugular and left a chunk missing from my neck in the process.

“There is no waking, Ryan. There is no better,” Deitre goaded, again in that chillingly hostile tone, as she leaned forward.

Pressing her breasts against my chest, she did something with the wet flick of her mouth at my neck that increased the sizzling pain until my eyes clamped shut and my breath hissed out on a ragged exhale.

Against my wil , my eyes slammed back open a second time. The hazy film was gone. A hundred mingled voices and the throb of blatantly carnal music lifted on the air as my surroundings came into detailed view. A club of some type, furnished richly, the walls and trimmings set in shades of black and deep bloodred. A lengthy balcony raised up ten feet overhead, more freakish faces watching over its railed side. Some focused on the dance floor teeming with otherworldly bodies. Most focused on me and Deitre atop the long side of an oval wet bar.

A big, burly guy stood in the center of the bar. With the gnarled face I could imagine only a demon would possess, he growled at Deitre, “Finish him!”

She lifted her mouth from whatever the hell she’d been doing at my neck to render the kind of pain that had nausea swimming in my gut. Her eyes met mine from a few inches away. No longer were hers that cool ice-blue, or tinged with tenderness or even sweet-yet-naughty seduction. Reddish-orange, the same fiery shade as the half halo of hair cascading around her nude body, centered them.

The malicious smile slipped from her lips with the opening of her mouth. Her teeth flashed. Teeth that appeared incredibly long. Jagged.

Stained with crimson that looked a whole hell of a lot like blood.

This was a dream. This had to be a dream. But would I feel such extreme pain in a dream? Would my mind be able to race with the impossible even as it swam with faintness? And why would I turn her into a bloodsucking monster in a dream?

Maybe it wasn’t a dream. Maybe not owning up to the truth about my past with Jada had finally pushed the shit in my head so far to the forefront that it turned me into the mental case I’d been a step away from becoming for months now.

Just in case it was neither of those options, which made it something too implausible to fathom, I demanded, “Who the hell are you?”

I meant to snarl the words. They came out as a whisper that sounded a hundred times more feeble than I had following that session with the butt plug. I felt a thousand times more winded. And then I felt a hundred thousand times more fearful as Deitre sank her chest back against mine and the warmth of her mouth closed over the area of my neck that already felt torn apart.

White-hot pain sliced through my neck. Tears of agony stung my eyes. My guts roiling bile up the back of my throat, I struggled to lift my hands. My feet. Anything to get her demonic mouth off my neck, to end this goddamned anguish. This woman I thought I trusted. Loved. This woman who wasn’t a woman at all.

What the fuck was she?

A nightmare. I stil wanted to believe I was either asleep or insane, but that seemed less of a possibility all the time. It seemed this really was happening. That she really was ripping into my body and slowly tearing me apart.

Blood dripping from her fangs, Deitre rocked back on my thighs. Even as my mind rejected her touch and her viciously ravenous smile, my gaze zeroed uncontrollably on her bare, bouncing breasts. Movement at her back had me looking to either side of her body.

To wings.

Black and huge, they were nothing I could think to dream of. Nothing I could know existed on Earth. If we were even still on Earth. Maybe I hadn’t lived that night of the processing plant fire.

Maybe I was in Hell.

Smaller wings emerged at the sides of her head. A tail curled up from her ass—a tail I’d seen once before but had written off as part of a fantasy costume.

I knew now that it had been no costume accessory. Her tail was real and coiling deadly tight around my throat as she shoved her hands against my chest and impaled her ever snug pussy onto my cock.

Claws extended from the tips of her fingers. Nipping them into my forearms, she ground her pubis against mine. “You’re not in Hel , Ry, baby. Not yet. But if you’re lucky, maybe as soon as your she-devil finishes fucking you to death.”

I t should have been perfect. The owner of Darkness, who was pul ing double duty as a bartender this morning, was pissed about me using his place of business to kill my latest victim. But other than that, Ryan’s murder should have been perfect.

Unlike the owner, nearly every patron in the club was keyed up by my performance on the bar, watching in raunchy, rapt anticipation as I dug my claws into Ryan’s forearms, tightened my tail’s grip around his throat until his eyes bulged and then again slammed closed, and rode his cock for what would be the last time.

That it would be the last time was the reason his murder wasn’t going perfect. Or, rather, my moony, mushy, guilty-as-hell feelings about killing him.

What I needed to focus on was that he’d been a driving force behind Jada’s death. For weeks before that, he’d been the primary reason for her sorrow by making her believe that he loved her and then leaving her without a backward glance. For those reasons and many more, he deserved to die.

The excitement lifting off the throng of supernaturals grew from anxious chatter and shouts of encouragement to a steady, throbbing chant of “Kil him!”

I let that chant fuel me. Let the taste of Ryan’s blood, still so fresh and warm on my teeth and tongue, obliterate my guilt as it called forth my natural instinct. I was born to seduce men to their deaths. This was my calling. One that I’d always loved. Almost as much as I’d nearly convinced myself I’d come to love Ryan.

Fury over my stupidity screamed through my head. I took it out on him.

Lowering my breasts to the sweaty, solid-packed wal of his chest, I uncoiled my tail from his throat, fitted my mouth to the unmarred side of his neck, and punctured a fresh vein. The blood here wasn’t as sweet, and that meant I’d already taken too much. I didn’t want him unconscious. I wanted him cognitive for every excruciating second of his end.

Only, shit, I didn’t.

No matter my cal ing, no matter how I’d operated for nearly two centuries, I didn’t want his sorry ass dying.

Using my wings, I shifted on his cock and cocooned his body against mine, shutting out the incessant chanting and the aroused, blood-hungry eyes of dozens of onlookers.

Freeing my teeth from his neck, I moved my head back a few inches and mentally forced his eyes to open.

Ryan eyed me through glassy green, his pupils dilated with a haze of confusion and pain. His breath pushed out as feathering exhales and his normally golden tanned face was near paper-white.

My guilt returned, lashing through me to an extent I’d felt only one other time, that night I had to teleport him out of the burning processing plant. Then, I’d held on to the hope of letting him live. Now, I might have already pushed him to death’s door.

With my heart knocking against my ribs and my belly turning somersaults over the idea of never again seeing his ridiculously cute lopsided smile, I demanded, “Tell me you knew Jada, Ryan! Tell me what you did to her!”

His features contorted with the parting of his lips. I waited, goddamned broke out another prayer. If he just told me the truth, I would save him. Heal him. Go against every facet of my calling and training, and love him.

“I…” He got out on a rough whisper. His head whipped to the side on a tortured cry then, and he emptied the contents of his stomach against the web of my wings.