by Larissa Ione
“What is she accused of?” Eidolon asked.
“Initiating an epidemic that is destroying wargs.” Seth’s voice carried through the emergency department as if he’d used a loudspeaker, and everyone within earshot stopped in their tracks to gawk. Even Bastien, who had obviously wasted no time in returning to work, froze solid, his push broom hovering over a pile of trash.
Sin squared her shoulders, taking on the Carceris guys without a trace of fear when any normal person would be shitting bricks. “And who is my accuser?”
“We weren’t given that information.” Seth whipped a set of Bracken cuffs out of his pocket. Developed by the Judicia to negate species’ abilities, these particular cuffs had tiny serrated spikes on the inside to prevent the wearer from struggling. “You will come.”
Con caught Sin’s arm. “Not yet,” he whispered in her ear. “But don’t fight. They aren’t affected by the Haven spell. They’ll beat the hell out of you, and there’s nothing you can do.”
“I’m not letting them take me,” she ground out.
“Neither am I,” Con said, and from the menace Eidolon was throwing off, neither was he. The wither drake moved to block the Harrowgate, leaving Con and Sin only one way out. The ambulance bay. “I’m going to the parking lot. Give me ten seconds, and then run to the first ambulance on the left. Try to avoid the wither drake’s gaze. He can reduce you to a wrinkled bag of skin in about ten seconds. Reconstitution isn’t fun.”
To Sin’s credit, she didn’t argue. She simply nodded and moved up behind E, putting her closer to the sliding-glass parking lot doors.
“Who will I have to answer to?” she asked Seth, who gave her a long, assessing look.
“The Warg Council.”
“This is a Seminus Council matter,” Eidolon said, but the vampire shook his head.
“You know the laws, demon. If the two Councils cannot decide on a punishment—”
“I haven’t been taken before either Council,” Sin interrupted.
“The wargs are not required to take their issue to your species Council,” Seth said. “It’s recommended, to avoid wasting Justice Dealer time with frivolous suits, but it’s their choice.”
“You’re lucky the wargs haven’t slaughtered you outright.” The wither drake’s voice was monotone, bored, and Con suspected he was hoping that Sin would resist arrest. The dude was going to get his wish. And then he was going to wish he hadn’t.
Frost formed on Eidolon’s words. “The Seminus Council would have taken issue with Sin’s death.”
“Only if they could prove that the Warg Council was involved.”
True. If some lone warg killed Sin, nothing would be done unless Sin’s family took revenge on a personal level or contacted Justice Dealers, who would probably rule in a single warg’s favor despite Eidolon’s history as a Dealer. Con didn’t think the Sem brothers were really the type to go the legal route anyway. They were much more the “hunt them down and kill them painfully” type.
Con got that.
“Well, Sin,” Con said loudly, “best of luck. E, I’m heading out on a run.” He caught Eidolon’s dark gaze for just a second, long enough to deliver his unspoken message. I’ll get Sin out.
He headed for the sliding-glass doors, where Wraith was waiting, big body propped casually against the frame, hands tucked in his jeans pockets as he watched. Anticipation glittered in his blue eyes. Con had no idea when the demon had arrived, but he was glad for the extra muscle. Wraith loved a good fight.
Con brushed past Wraith with a nod, climbed into the newest of three black ambulances, and started it up. As if turning the key was a signal, Sin burst out of the hospital. Wraith stepped out as well, his leather duster kicking up around his ankles, and then the Carceris officers were there, Eidolon on their heels. He wouldn’t have been able to do much to stop them inside the hospital, but the parking lot wasn’t protected by the Haven spell.
Sin dashed toward the ambulance while Wraith effortlessly laid the Carceris vamp out with a fist to the throat. Eidolon grabbed the wither drake by the arm, but not in time to prevent him from launching a lock-dart—a weapon that, once it pierced its target, paralyzed the victim until he arrived at a Carceris prison.
Lightning quick, Wraith knocked the dart askew with his hand, but it struck a glancing blow to Sin’s thigh as it corkscrewed downward. Blood sprayed, and though she yelped, she didn’t slow. As Eidolon decked the demon, Wraith pinned the vamp before he could rise, and Sin leaped into the rig’s passenger seat.
“Go!” she shouted, as she slammed the door shut.
Con hit a button on the dash, and the rear wall of the parking lot shimmered, revealing a human parking garage on the other side.
The rig’s tires squealed as they spun out of the stall. Once they were through the portal, it closed again, turning into a solid, concrete wall. No humans, if they were ever to trespass, would see the door for what it really was.
He turned to Sin, who was looking back to make sure the Carceris guys weren’t somehow breaking through the barrier. “You okay?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“You’re bleeding.”
She clapped a hand over the wound. “I’ve had worse.”
Heart still pounding, he peeled out into the early-morning Manhattan traffic, his aggressive move causing more than a few honking horns. “Keep pressure on it. We’ll pull over in a minute and patch it up.”
“I said I’m okay.”
“Don’t be a stubborn idiot.” He slammed on the brakes to avoid crushing a taxi that pulled out in front of him, though Con intentionally let the ambulance trade paint with the other vehicle, just to make the driver piss his pants. “You can’t afford an infection right now.” Besides, the scent was going to trip his crazy switch if they didn’t get her wound covered.
She rolled her eyes. “How much trouble are E and Wraith in?”
“Interfering with Carceris officers and their duty?” He wondered if he should lie, then decided she could handle it. “A lot.” He didn’t bother telling her he was in for a good time with whips, canes, and waterwheels at the hands of torturers, too, because he doubted she cared.
“Damn,” she breathed.
“They’ll be okay. E’s got experience with the system, and Wraith is… Wraith.”
“I don’t want to owe them. They’re into my shit enough as it is.”
“Ah.”
“Ah, what?” She turned away from looking out the passenger window to glare at him. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
She must have let up on the pressure on her cut, because a particularly strong whiff of blood made his fangs pulse. He breathed through it the way he always did when he’d failed to feed and was treating a bleeding patient. But he’d fed—from Sin—only hours ago, and he shouldn’t be having this reaction.
A chill ripped into his marrow as an ugly thought came to him. What if addiction was already starting to set in? It shouldn’t start until around the sixth feeding, but he was rapidly learning that, with Sin, very little was predictable.
“Earth to Con.” Sin waved her hand in front of his face, breaking him out of both autopilot and the thoughts he didn’t want to be thinking. “What does ‘ah’ mean?”
“Just wondering what makes you tick.” He eased to a stop at a light and watched the first rays of the morning sun peek between two office buildings. “You didn’t ask out of concern if they would be in trouble. You asked because you don’t want to owe your brothers. Why is that?”
Surprisingly, she didn’t fire off a shot at him. Instead, she went still and silent, and the tantalizing aroma of her blood—and her—thickened in the cab. He glanced at her leg, where a crimson flow seeped between her fingers, and his grip on the steering wheel became white-knuckled as the medical side of him that wanted to fix her battled with the dhampire side that wanted to taste her. Maybe there was a bag of O-pos in the back.
She shifted, throwing her head back against the seat, which had the unfor
tunate effect of making her small breasts jut forward, testing the elasticity of the black tank top she wore beneath her leather jacket.
The steering wheel groaned under the force of his grip, as the male in him leaped into the fray with the medical and dhampire sides. Damned succubi. He yanked the wheel, and with a squeal of tires, the ambulance whipped into a parking lot.
“What are you doing?” she snapped. “Oh, my God, do you even know how to drive?”
He popped a ticket from the machine, found a parking spot, and shut down the engine, unconcerned that humans would notice them. The ensorcelled ambulance wasn’t invisible to human eyes, but it registered only in their subconscious. Humans would avoid the rig, react to it on the road, but they wouldn’t think of it or its passengers as anything odd or interesting.
No, his concern right now was demons.
And his own desire, which was another kind of demon entirely.
“Climb in the back,” he said tightly. “I’m going to treat your wound.”
“I told you—”
“I don’t care.” His voice was cold, his body hot, and the mix was wreaking havoc with his patience. “You’re on my turf, in my rig, so you follow my rules.”
She glared. “What if the Carceris finds us?”
“They won’t.” He reached between the two seats and shoved open the small door to the box section of the rig. “They’ll be looking for you in the obvious places first. Not city parking lots.”
“And after you’re done patching me up?”
Good question, and he hadn’t thought that far ahead. Probably because his brain was swamped with her scent. “I’m taking you home,” he said finally. “You’re coming home with me.”
Six
“I’m not going home with you.”
“We’ll talk about it while I’m patching you up.” Con jerked his thumb toward the back. “Go.”
Grudgingly, Sin climbed between the front seats and ducked through the hatchlike door separating the cab from the box section of the ambulance. A dull red light illuminated the space, and the same Haven spell symbols from UG were scrawled on the walls, but other than that, it could have been a human ambulance.
Her leg throbbed as she worked her way down the narrow aisle between the bench seat and the stretcher, but that wound wasn’t nearly as bad as the pain spreading through her arm. She didn’t have to look to know a large gash had split her dermoire across her biceps. The pain had struck suddenly, but she’d borne it in silence, the way she always did. As an assassin, she never gave her victims the luxury of a scream, so she figured she didn’t deserve one any more than they did.
She didn’t deserve for the gash to be treated, either. She’d allow Con to mend her leg, but her arm was off limits.
Con jerked down black rubber shades from rollers over each window. Every sliver of outside light was snuffed, obviously a necessity when transporting vamps and other light-sensitive demons during the day. “Take off your pants.”
“Wow. Not one for foreplay, are you?”
He turned to her with lethal grace despite the limitations of the cramped compartment. “I spend hours on foreplay,” he said, his voice a slow, sexy drawl. “What about you?”
Heat flooded her face. Somehow, he knew the answer, knew she’d never engaged in foreplay in her life. For her, sex was fast food, not gourmet cuisine. Oh, she enjoyed it with the right partners, but the desire to linger in bed, taking pleasure in a male’s body, had been crushed out of her a long time ago. Now, sex was about staying alive. In the last thirty years especially, it had become routine, quick trysts with a couple of assassins from her den, with only the occasional roll in the hay with males like Con to shake things up.
And now that she was an assassin master, she rarely left the den except to go to Guild headquarters or the hospital, so her choices had been even more severely limited, mostly to Lycus. It would probably be that way for the rest of her life.
“Foreplay is overrated.” The gash in her arm screamed with pain as she shed her pants and hopped up on the stretcher. She left her thigh and ankle holsters in place, though, because her weapons weren’t going anywhere.
“Then you’re not doing it right.” Con snapped on some surgical gloves, somehow making the sound and the action erotic. “You’ve had shitty lovers.”
“You were one of my lovers,” she pointed out, but he didn’t take the bait.
“Once. And there is something to be said for a hard, fast fuck.” His voice became a mesmerizing purr. “But there’s nothing like taking the time to slowly peel off every article of clothing, to kiss every inch of your lover’s skin as you do it. To lick all the sensitive places until they quiver. To explore all the textures of your partner’s body with your fingers, your mouth.” His fangs flashed as he added, “Your teeth.”
Hunger gripped her so fiercely she had to struggle to breathe. Yet somehow, she managed to speak calmly, as if Con’s graphic words hadn’t affected her. “The end result is the same. An orgasm. So why waste all that time? In the hour it takes you to lick someone from head to toe”—God, seriously? Want.—“I could have had half a dozen orgasms.” Assuming she was with some fictional male who could come that many times, too—or a Seminus demon, whose ejaculate left females climaxing over and over, even if he left the room.
“Trust me,” he murmured, “the wait is worth it. You’ll get all those, but they’ll be better. Hotter. A-fucking-mazing.”
Sin went utterly wet and achy. Even if her succubus needs weren’t creeping up on her, Con would have jump-started things.
“Put pressure on your laceration.” The abrupt change of tone and subject made her blink, but he turned away to paw through the glass-faced cabinets and toss supplies next to her on the gurney.
Still dizzy with the images he’d put in her head, she grabbed a paper towel from the dispenser behind her and held it to the bleeding wound. A trickle of warmth ran down her arm and into her palm, and she covertly tucked another paper towel inside her coat sleeve. Then she entertained herself by watching Con’s fine ass hugged by black BDU pants. When he swiveled around back to her, she got a kick out of the way his gaze went to her bare thighs and black silk thong that was now damp with her arousal.
The longer he stared, the faster her heart beat, the more her belly fluttered.
The hotter it got inside the damned ambulance.
When his silver eyes finally snapped up, they’d darkened to a rich, smooth pewter, the hunger in them stark and undeniable, which was no surprise given what they’d just been talking about. For just a moment, she wondered if he’d act on his need, and she was both disappointed and relieved when he sank down on the padded bench across from her.
“This is pointless,” she said, even though the towel under her fingers had soaked through. “I heal quickly.”
“The dart the Carceris struck you with was coated with an anticoagulant. Keeps you bleeding so they can track you in the event that the dart doesn’t stick.”
Clever. “How do you know so much about them?”
“I’ve had my fair share of experience with them.” He gripped her calves with both hands, spread her legs, and tugged her forward so he was between her thighs, her knees resting against either side of his ribs.
Sin tried to ignore the intimate position, but her body couldn’t, and she tensed, feeling caged even though it was he who was pinned between her legs. “You’ve been arrested? What did you do?”
“Like I said, I have experience with them.”
“Ooh,” she teased, dragging her foot up his back. “A bad boy. Come on, spill.”
“Maybe I killed annoying succubi for fun.” His words were gruff, but his fingers were gentle as he lifted the towel to inspect her leg wound.
“I hope you gave them a bunch of those foreplay orgasms first.” He snorted, but didn’t offer up any details about his time with the Carceris. Clearly, he wasn’t going to talk, so she studied the inside of the ambulance, with its cabinets, benches, and a
station near the front that looked like a miniature chem lab for mixing potions. “So, how do vampires do this job, anyway? Doesn’t the sight and smell of blood make you hungry?”
“If you’ve just gorged on Thanksgiving dinner, do you want to have a sandwich?”
That was a joke. She hadn’t had a Thanksgiving dinner since her grandparents had been alive. But suddenly, she craved turkey, mince pie, and homemade rolls. Nostalgia, something she’d banned long ago, filled her with the same warmth she’d felt when her family gathered around the rickety old holiday dinner table. As a child, she’d envisioned futures that involved a husband, children, Uncle Loren and his family, all gathered for holidays with their grandparents. Now she knew better than to let those childish dreams in, and ruthlessly, she flexed her arm and allowed the pain to bring her back to the present, where she’d never celebrate sappy, sentimental holidays again.
“I don’t want food after a large meal, no, but… Oh, so you feed before your shift?”
“And during. We keep snacks in the cooler. All medics do, depending on their species. Worked with one partner who gnawed on bones the entire shift.”
Gross. “What if it’s not just diet that’s an issue for you guys? What if it’s something else?”
“What? Like needing to kill or absorb pain?”
She shrugged. “Or screw.”
One tawny eyebrow shot up. “Species who kill uncontrollably can’t be medics, but we used to have one guy who fed on others’ pain. This was the perfect job for him, until he decided he’d rather not make patients feel better. The sex thing… I don’t know. Guess it depends on the breed of incubi or succubi. Shade manages fine for short shifts. Why? You thinking about signing up? Because I’ll bet you wouldn’t have any trouble getting a partner who could, ah, help you out between runs.”
Oh, and wouldn’t that conversation with Shade, who ran the paramedic program, be fun? “Thanks, but I already have a job.”
