by Anne Malcom
I scowled. “It was for the greater good. My limbs need to be nice and relaxed. Stops them for getting yanked off as easy.” I gave him a look, taunting him with the memory of how awesome bath sex was. “Plus, you weren’t complaining.”
His heartbeat intensified, as did his gaze, desire soaking up the air in the room.
I looked to Sophie, my skin prickling with need. “You need to get whatever ingredients for that witchy vampire birth control like yesterday,” I demanded.
She grinned knowingly. “Have some self-control, Isla. You’re five hundred years old.”
“And I’ve achieved a lot in five hundred years, but mastery over self-control is not one of those things.” I glared at her for finding my pain amusing. “And right now, I’m fighting that self-control over bitch-slapping my sassy witch friend,” I bit out.
She rolled her eyes and snatched her purse up from where she’d hurled it onto the sofa. “Fine. Always with the threats of violence. A ‘please’ or a BMW wouldn’t go astray when you demand things.” She looked to Thorne. “Good luck, dude.”
Then she sauntered out the door, blowing a kiss over her shoulder.
My eyes followed her exit, and I toyed with the idea of throwing something at her head. I immediately ruled that out because if I caved in her skull, that would mean I wouldn’t be getting the birth control spell.
And just knowing I couldn’t have sex only made me want it more.
That and Thorne was sexy as sin, so I naturally wanted to jump his bones at any given moment. Ditto for him, because I was sexier than sin.
In the vague recesses of my mind, I thought about the fact that Sophie hadn’t educated us on why she was at the apartment at 3:00 a.m. in the first place. Sure, she stopped by whenever she wanted, but my initial look at her told me it was not for a cup of tea or to suggest we go out demon hunting.
But she was already gone, and I was sure if it was super important she’d get around to filling me in.
For now, I had a really hot and still rather angry male to deal with.
When I glanced to him, he did not seem to be thinking of jumping my bones, though his eyes had been glued to me a good long while.
“Can we stop with the intense looks?” I asked snippily. “Like seriously, I know this is somewhat of a complicated period in my death, what with all the prophecies and upcoming apocalypses, but we don’t need the Vin Diesel expression constantly. Even I tire of it, and I’ve seen all the Fast movies three times. Even Tokyo Drift.” I shuddered at the thought. The things I did for Dominic Toretto.
Thorne’s jaw ticked. “You aren’t even remotely concerned as to why this has come early?”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “I’m concerned about my lack of ability to come at all, early or otherwise,” I snapped, my downstairs area agreeing with me. “Otherwise, it is what it is.” I shrugged. It did suck, but it was biology, and even Thorne couldn’t muscle his way out of it. Or into it, much to my chagrin. I was vampire enough to realize that even I couldn’t fuck with nature.
He stalked forward. “Have you not thought this through?”
“I barely think anything through,” I replied, watching his approach with a hooded gaze. He stalked like a panther, limbs strong, dangerous. Deadly. My body simmered with heat, with suffocating need.
I steeled myself against the urge to jump him, despite the almost certain result of a vampire slayer spawn. I also pretended that not all of me was disgusted with the idea. “This happened like two seconds ago, so no, I’ve not thought it through,” I said, forcing my voice light and sharp like I wasn’t thinking about how I’d teach our son the best way to kill people who pissed him off. “I most likely will be thinking through my next shoe purchase, though.”
He snatched me into his arms roughly, my bones protesting and my ovaries rejoicing. “The enemy has powerful witches,” he ground out.
“Had,” I corrected. “We—and by we, I mean me—killed two, and then we’ve got the other one on ice. Or in chains. Or pieces. Whatever.”
I added in a visit to Sophie’s offices to my agenda for tomorrow. It was kind of shitty of me to drop off a deadly all-powerful dark witch and then just leave Sophie to handle the torture and imprisonment alone. Especially when she looked how she looked.
Thorne’s grip tightened. “Maybe that’s what they wanted,” he clipped. “Get her close enough so she could cast some fuckin’ spell over you, get your Awakening accelerated.” His eyes bored into me. “You know that’s what your mother has been planning for.”
I schooled my face, my reactions, but I feared Thorne knew me well enough to see the effect his words had. The sobering effect.
The one that married my mother’s and Jonathan’s calculating gazes at the mansion, and my mother’s ongoing threat of having me kidnapped and raped at my next Awakening.
She’d talked about suitable vampires. Now I was sure it would be Jonathan if they got me where they wanted me. Which was not happening. No one ever got me where they wanted me. If that was the case, I’d have been six feet under, or ashes, long before now.
Still, there was a chill that settled over me with Thorne’s words, with the thought of Jonathan’s empty eyes that had been on me the day before.
So naturally I drained the half-full bottle I’d been holding in one swallow in order to chase away the chill, the dread. “She’s been planning a lot of things,” I replied, throwing the empty bottle at the same spot Thorne threw the vase.
I smiled when it smashed everywhere. My eyes went back to Thorne’s; his gaze hadn’t even twitched with the sound. He lived with me now—well, we alternated on account of the spawn having sleepovers at his place—so he was used to such things.
“My rape and subsequent birth of a monster probably doesn’t feature on that list since she’s now set on bringing about a rebellion that will topple the current monarchy” I continued. “Plus, it’s biologically impossible for magic to alter such things,” I lied. I had no fucking idea whether it was possible, but Thorne was beginning to irritate me with all this concern. “Stop thinking so much. Your head might explode.”
“Well I’ve got to do the thinking for two people since one of us seems fuckin’ determined to die,” he seethed, gripping me tighter as if he expected me to somehow float away from him.
“I’m already dead,” I corrected.
Though that wasn’t really true anymore, since my Awakening had made me decidedly more alive than I had been before.
And being more alive meant I was closer to being more totally dead than ever before.
Chapter 2
Two Days Later
“You need to stop hovering,” I snapped at Thorne.
He didn’t move from where he was, pretty much attached to my fucking shadow while I waited for my broken leg to finish healing. It wasn’t fair, how he was utilizing the fact that I couldn’t get up and storm away as I normally would when he tried be all caring about something silly like a broken bone or a missing limb.
Then again, he wasn’t exactly caring. He was actually pretty pissed, as he had been when the broken bone happened yesterday when we’d decided to get a head start on looking up immortals connected with the rebellion who therefore might have a locale on Jonathan.
My Awakening wasn’t about to slow me down; in fact, it only invigorated the mission to find and kill the man I thought I’d loved and lost before he came and tried to rape me and impregnate me.
Sophie was in Mexico to get the ingredients for my contraception spell, which was pretty nice of her to do considering there was a deadly witch in her office who needed to be killed, and babysat until said killing commenced.
Duncan was currently babysitting the witch. The sick fuck had volunteered.
I doubted it would be as fun as he thought it would be. Especially if now she was without her glamor and he got to figure out the hot blonde he’d been leering at was a decomposing corpse. I would’ve hung around the rancid witch just to see that reaction alone.
> But I didn’t babysit.
And I got to have way more fun yesterday, broken leg aside.
Scott was proving himself rather useful with the fact that he was lowly regarded in his mundane job at the Sector. And his half-blood status. That meant people underestimated him, or dismissed him if they even noticed him, which they rarely did. So he had been putting it to good use, hacking the Sector’s databases, looking for the vampires with the highest strikes against them for misbehaving and killing too many humans or doing so in public.
Then he’d follow the vampires, who of course didn’t notice him. Lions didn’t notice the mice that followed them as they stalked their prey, after all.
Which was how we’d made it to the docks in the middle of the night, where Scott had called us from after finding out from ‘a friend’—I was surprised such beings existed too—that this particular vampire had heavy connections to the rebellion.
Thorne hadn’t wanted me to go.
So of course I was here.
But he was too.
Scott had met us with a grin, as was usual. He’d tried to hug me.
I’d brandished my copper knife at him.
“You know better than to do that, Scotty,” I hissed. “Seriously. You know me better than this. And you need to stop acting like we’re teenage girls who ‘haven’t seen each other in like forever.’” I put on a nasally and saccharine-sweet accent, my best Valley Girl impression. I narrowed my eyes as he continued to smile, despite the knife at his throat. “You’re a vampire, and you’re also being seen with me. So make it your default to fucking punch people when you greet them if you need contact so bad. I’d appreciate the punch much more,” I shot.
I didn’t add that I didn’t want him touching me and starting to plan my baby shower once he realized my Awakening was in full swing. He’d probably cry.
“Okay, Isla,” he said dutifully. “I’m just happy to see you, you know, after Russia and having to….”
“Kill my brothers? See my dead hubby come back to life?”
He flinched as if it had happened to him and nodded gravely. “I’m sorry, I know it must’ve—”
“For fuck’s sake, Scott, you’re not Jerry Springer,” I snapped, glancing around the shadows, making sure no one was eavesdropping on the positively embarrassing conversation. “We’re not here to talk about our feelings. We’re here to interrogate, torture, and kill the vampire you fingered for information.” I raised my brow and my unintended double entendre. Then I looked around the quiet and abandoned docks. “Where the fuck is he?”
Scott pointed to a warehouse door that was slightly ajar. “In there. He took a human woman with him.” He scrunched his face up. “I was going to go in before he could…”
“Kill her? Rape her?” I offered helpfully.
He nodded, flinching again as if he was human and didn’t need to drink human blood to survive. “But I think she’s already gone.” His face was twisted with the regret and pain this reality caused him.
Scott didn’t kill humans. Well, he killed dying humans—though they were all dying, if you wanted to get technical—the ones who needed the comfort of death to escape the pain of life.
Violence was not his thing; he was a sensitive flower. Which begged the question as to why he was around me, when violence was my norm, evidenced by the eye patch he wore to cover the spot where he’d had his eye hacked out by an enchanted blade as a result of me pissing off a no-neck human.
It wasn’t really my fault.
But I did cut out No Neck’s eye in return.
“That’s not our concern, Scotty,” I said, voice firm, trying to whip some of that stubborn kindness out of him. It wouldn’t do him well in what I guessed would be some of the cruelest times of the war. “We’re not here to save the world from vampires. We’re just here to make sure it’s ignorant to them.” And on that, I sauntered toward the warehouse door, leaving Thorne and Scott in my wake.
I knew Thorne was not happy about me taking point because it grated against his alpha male tendencies, but that was really going to have to change. I wore the fangs in the relationship, and even if I currently wasn’t wearing pants, and rarely did, they were always proverbially on when it came to battling immortals.
I kicked the door off its hinges for dramatic effect, and also to make sure I still had enough juice in me despite the increased mortality rate that came with an Awakening. And then there was the pesky death curse I was still in the grips of.
Though Thorne’s blood seemed to be counteracting that rather fast. Good thing too. There was a lot of fighting still to be done, and I intended on being where I belonged—right in the middle of it all.
I had been expecting one vampire in the middle of either draining a corpse or fucking one. It was likely to be the latter since no vampire picked such a cliché spot unless they were up to something really fucked up.
But it was not just one vampire doing depraved things to a corpse. There were four. Their heads snapped up as soon as I made my entrance.
“Room for three more?” I asked sweetly.
Then I glared at Scott over my shoulder. “Seriously, dude? You can’t figure out one from three? I’m getting you a tutor,” I snapped. “And an MRI.”
Then I winked at Thorne, who was glaring at me and yanking his dagger from his belt.
They all dropped the human without ceremony, though as I got closer I noticed something… off about three of the vampires.
They weren’t quite right, their morphed features too animalistic, their movements too jerky and ungraceful. Almost like hybrids, but the hybrids we’d encountered so far were little more than wild animals, attacking without hesitation. These did nothing but hiss and growl.
There was one woman with matted blonde hair that might’ve once been in a severe bun, a blouse that had before been white, now stained with dirt and blood. Her slacks were wrinkled and ripped at the bottom. The men were much the same, looking to be businessmen who had seen better days and whose suits hadn’t been dry-cleaned in a while.
Yes, I was sure they had once been human.
Now? Not so much.
The fangs showing from their bloodstained mouths were a dead giveaway.
And the fact that they were dead. Literally. I could hear not one heartbeat between them. Granted, it was kind of hard to hear as well as I had in the past without the resounding echo in my chest.
The vampire who stepped in front of them was indeed a vampire. His suit was not dirty, but clean and well-tailored. His hair was groomed and smoothed to the side. He was thin, wiry almost, his face drawn and too angular to be anything but pure strange-looking. Though his eyes radiated menace and a superiority that told me he did not frequent abandoned warehouses on the dock.
Something that told me he was of a higher Vein Line.
His eyes were running over me much like mine had been him—sizing him up, then Scott, and then bulging at Thorne. “You are a race traitor, whoever you are. Walking with a slayer?” he spat at me, words saturated with fury but also in that nasally undertone of aristocracy.
The hybrids behind him lined up like dogs waiting to attack.
I stopped in front of him, not exactly worried. I could take down three hybrids and a vampire without even breaking a nail, even with all the shit Mother Nature decided to throw me—witch curse included.
“I don’t just walk with him, I sleep with him too.” I winked. “Well, not sleep, since I’m not human. I fuck him.” Then I paused, my mind going back over the words I’d barely listened to. “Wait, whoever I am?” My stomach dropped. “You don’t know who I am?” I moaned, throwing down my hands in despair. “After centuries of putting considerable amounts of effort into cultivating a bad reputation, and it was pretty much all for nothing.” My spirits hit 2007 Britney rock bottom.
“Because one person doesn’t know who you are, it’s all for nothing?” Thorne asked, voice tight with readiness to abandon the conversation and start with the killing portion of t
he evening. I knew the dead woman behind the vamps was getting to him.
He was just as bad as Scott.
Dead was dead. There was no point dwelling. I’d dwelled over a dead human for five hundred years, and look where that got me.
I whipped my head around and glared at Thorne. I wasn’t worried about turning my attention from the vamp because I could already tell he wasn’t a seasoned fighter. “Um, yes, of course,” I snapped. “Do you think there was a single person who didn’t know who Lord Voldemort was? That fucker excelled at making sure his reputation preceded him.”
Thorne stared. “You’re really going to hang your case on a fictional villain?”
“How do you know it’s fictional?” I countered. “The whole point of the survival of the wizarding world is that it’s a secret. Just because it’s in a movie doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Have you seen, um, I don’t know, any teen movies lately? Odds are you’ll find a vampire, and I’m pretty sure we’re real. That means Voldemort could be too.” I rolled my eyes. “And he wasn’t just a villain, he was a Dark Lord, and totally misunderstood if you ask me. Maybe if he had a good plastic surgeon, things would’ve ended differently.”
“Harry didn’t know who Voldemort was at the start,” Scott offered cheerily.
He was treated to my glare. “And what does that little gem of information offer at this juncture, Scott?” I hissed.
His smile disappeared. “Well, I, um… I thought it would help.”
I let out an exaggerated sigh. “You know what would help? Killing that idiot who managed to run away while Thorne decided to debate the badassery of Voldemort with me.”
My eyes went to the retreating figure. As did Thorne and Scott’s.
I had known from the second we’d laid eyes on the wiry fucker that he’d run. He was bred not to need to fight, to expect vampires to bow down to him because of blood. He’d obviously created the hybrids in front of us to ensure he kept his suit clean.
Not on my watch.
I waved at where the door was swinging with the haste of his exit. “Run along. Kill the idiot,” I ordered Scott. “No, wait, we need to interrogate him. Just catch him,” I amended.
