Temptation (League of Vampires Book 8)

by Rye Brewer

“Do they really drive through the city streets?” I asked, wondering how more people didn’t get killed.

  “Sure. You didn’t know that?”

  I snorted. “You may not know this about me, but I don’t pay attention to car racing.”

  We both chuckled. No, I was much more interested in the nightlife around those parts—that, I knew about. It was infamous, after all.

  “What about the casinos?” I asked. “And the nightclubs and parties?”

  “I should’ve known you would be interested in that.” He spun me in his arms until I faced him, and I linked my wrists around his neck. “Here I was, thinking we could enjoy a little time together, first. Just the two of us.”

  “I thought that was a given,” I smiled just before standing on tiptoe to kiss him. Yes, I wanted to spend time with him. I wanted nothing more than him. The rest was window dressing, icing on the cake. He was the cake.

  And I wanted him all to myself. Greedy, perhaps, but I had earned the right to be greedy when it came to Vance.

  I rested my cheek against his chest, still looking out over the dazzling scene. I could hear the life down there, the laughter, the horns from the boats and the cars alike. I could almost feel the rhythm of it all, or perhaps it could have been the beating of Vance’s heart beneath my ear.

  “I promise, we’ll get to Paris,” he whispered, kissing the top of my head.

  “Paris? What’s Paris?” I murmured, feeling dizzy and dreamy, like I was in a fantasy come to life. “This is enough. I would like to see it again, yes. But this is more than enough.”

  “I just don’t like what I’ve heard is going on there,” he continued, and I knew it troubled him if he felt the need to expound when we were wrapped in each other’s arms with a warm breeze caressing our skin.

  I looked up at him to find him frowning. “The attacks, you mean.”

  “Vampire-on-vampire,” he grimaced. “I can’t imagine who would do something like that, but we don’t need it. I’d do anything to keep you safe, even if it means locking you in this apartment and throwing away the key.”

  “Hmm…” I looked inside through the open doors, surveying the comfortable, spacious apartment. It rivaled the penthouse in Manhattan in terms of both comfort and size, tastefully decorated, full of top-of-the-line electronics and a refrigerator stocked with synthetic blood. “I assume you wanted that to come out as a threat, or that you expected me to be disappointed, but…”

  He laughed, looking and sounding more and more like the old Vance all the time. I couldn’t describe my relief at how happy he seemed, how carefree. He needed this getaway as much as I did, or more.

  “I didn’t mention that I’ll be locked in with you,” he growled, holding me tighter.

  “Again, am I supposed to be unhappy? Because that only sweetens the deal,” I chuckled, but that chuckle turned to a happy sigh as Vance kissed me again. And again.

  Even as he was sweeping me up and away with him, the thought of my family lingered in the back of my mind. My brothers were spread out all over the place, all of them battling their own private wars. And I missed them. I wanted to help them, all of them.

  But I couldn’t. I had to give myself permission to let them travel their paths while I traveled mine. I couldn’t be at their beck and call all the time, not anymore. It was time for me to find happiness like Jonah had with Anissa, and I finally knew where to start.

  With whom to start.

  Vance’s mouth skimmed my throat, sending shivers up my spine. “I hope your heart wasn’t set on going out tonight,” he whispered, his breath hot against my skin.

  “What if it was?” I teased, my eyes closed. “How will you make it up to me?”

  His chuckle was dark. Promising much, revealing little. “I have a few ideas.”

  35

  Cari

  Waiting for them to wake up was torture like I never could have imagined.

  Would they ever wake up? Had they gotten too much of the sedative, whatever it was? Or were they dosed too soon after the first dose, when all four of us were injected?

  I had no way of knowing how long I’d been unconscious, thanks to there being no clock anywhere nearby and no windows. All I could do was wait on that hard, cold floor.

  And wonder.

  How much should I tell them? They knew Gil was my father, of course. And the shackles confirmed that we were all prisoners. They would already know that.

  Should they know about the plans for testing? What would it do to them? I didn’t want to make things worse—though, really, how much worse would I be making them? It hardly seemed like we were in a good spot, locked in some underground jail cell.

  When they started to stir, I was glad and apprehensive at the same time. It meant they would want to know what happened while they were out.

  “Wow.” Raze shook his head, like he was trying to clear the cobwebs. “Whatever’s in that stuff packs a punch.”

  “I have a headache,” Naomi groaned, rolling her head on her shoulders. “Among other aches.”

  Gage was already thinking logically. Of course, he would be. “This sedative, whatever it is, must have been designed especially for vampires. We would never succumb to any basic human-strength concoction.” He sounded tired, at a loss.

  And to think, I was the one who had led them all to this. If I hadn’t been so dead set on seeing my father again… and then, set on exploring the estate…

  I closed my eyes and wished I were dead. Just dead and gone.

  “Did they give you anything, Cari?” Gage asked.

  I opened one eye halfway and saw the three of them looking at me. I shook my head. “No,” I whispered. “They didn’t. My father—Gil wanted to talk to me.” I hardly wanted to refer to him as my father anymore. A father wouldn’t turn his back on his daughter this way.

  “What did he say?” Naomi asked. “Why is he doing this?”

  “Do you think he would just come out and tell her?” Gage asked.

  “Why don’t you give Cari a chance to tell us?” Raze muttered.

  “I only want everyone to give her some space.” Gage glared at him.

  “He’s in charge of an order—or something—called the Starkers,” I said, raising my voice over the rest.

  They went silent.

  A pin could’ve dropped a mile away and I would’ve heard it. For a second, I was sure they had all stopped breathing.

  Then. “He’s what?” Naomi shrieked, eyes wide. “You’re serious? And you didn’t know anything about this? How could you not have known?”

  “I didn’t! I swear!”

  “They’ve been hunting us for centuries—and we’ve been hunting them,” she added in a hissing whisper. “All these years, none of us were able to find their base. And here we are, completely by accident.” She threw her head back and laughed—hysterically, like she was losing her mind.

  “Naomi…” Raze tried to move closer to her. “Don’t do this to yourself.”

  “Do what?” she laughed. “I find it funny. Don’t you? Here they’ve been all this time, hiding in plain sight, and I’m here. And powerless. Nothing I can do about it, when what I want to do is kill them all and burn this place to the ground!”

  “No more than any of us do,” Raze murmured, obviously working to calm her down.

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” She had never been anything but sweet with him before—now, she snarled. “The Starkers killed one of my best friends. Perhaps if you knew what that was like, you would understand the need to end them, once and for all. You’ve lived a comfortable life thus far. I know it was lived under a horrible leader, yes, but you were still secure and comfortable. That was not the case for too many of us.”

  Raze nodded. “I’m sorry. You’re right. I don’t understand.”

  She turned to me, and the heat from her gaze all but burned through me. “All this time, I’ve done everything I could not to get myself entangled with them—to hunt them, but never to al
low myself to become their prey. And you led me straight into their nest. Thoughtless, careless—”

  “It’s not her fault,” Raze reminded her, while Gage remained ominously silent. His expression told me that silence was out of fear of what he might say to her, not because he agreed. “We all agreed to come. You even told me not to come because you knew how dangerous it could be. No one forced you.”

  His words seemed to deflate her anger. Her shoulders fell, she bowed her head. Dark hair hung in clumps around her face. “That’s true,” she whispered.

  She might as well have stomped all over me, pummeled me with her fists, tore me apart with her claws. Her words had roughly the same effect. I ached all over, especially in my chest. She was right about all of it. “Do you think I haven’t already blamed myself?” I asked. “Not that I would rob you of the chance to spit at me and call me names for what I led us into—you’re entitled—but I already understand what I’ve done. You don’t have to worry about that.”

  I only hoped my father had nothing to do with her friend’s death. That would’ve been the straw that broke the camel’s back.

  “Who was your friend?” Raze asked, his voice soft and gentle like he was calming a tired toddler. “What happened to her? Can you talk about it?”

  She was quiet for a long time, the only sound that of her heavy breathing. I wasn’t sure if I wanted her to tell the story or not. I was afraid of what she had to say.

  “We were in Madrid,” she whispered. “It was a crazy time. The Glorious Revolution. Queen Isabella was on almost everyone’s hit list at that point—conservatives, progressives. She was not a good leader. I’d only been in Spain a few years by then, but the unrest had been building all the while. There was so much anger, so much tension. And so many people willing to take advantage of it.”

  The only sound in the room was that of Naomi’s haunted voice. The rest of us were so quiet, I couldn’t even hear them breathing.

  She lifted her head. “I won’t lie. We were among the ones taking advantage. I fell in with a group of Spanish vampires, including Esmerelda.” A slow smile spread over her face as she remembered. “Esmerelda was the daughter of a farmer who’d been turned by a traveling peddler. Not that her life would’ve been lived better on a farm, her talents would have been wasted. She was special. She had a way about her. The men might have officially led the group, but she was the real leader. We revolved around her. She sang, she danced, she told stories so vivid a person would swear afterward they’d witnessed the events of the story in person. As the only two women in the group, we gravitated to each other.”

  I wondered what life must have been like in those days. Whether a vampire or a human, it must have been amazing.

  Naomi scoffed, her smile turning wry. “All of them were in love with her. It was clear. If I hadn’t known better, I would’ve sworn she was truly a witch, weaving a spell around them. Around me, even, in a different way. She intrigued me. She was free, always laughing, always feisty and passionate. I’d never known a girl like her before, not living as I had in the palace. I was always the outlier then, the one who would beg the others to join me in my little adventures. Esmerelda proved to me that I wasn’t so strange, after all.”

  Gage cleared his throat. “You said you took advantage of the unrest at the time. How did you do that?”

  She shrugged. “There were protests in the streets, meetings in the marketplaces and taverns, always plenty of fresh, hot blood for the taking. One or two men go missing from a meeting or speech? Who’s to say how it happened in the midst of so much excitement?”

  She snickered, then shook her head. “That’s to say nothing of what it was like when the tension finally exploded, and protestors began fighting amongst themselves. It was like picking low-hanging fruit. Always a new victim, no matter where one looked. They were obsessed with fighting the government, with overthrowing the Queen, and in the end they wound up fighting amongst themselves. They never thought to look out for the vampires dodging in and out of their groups, always on the edge of a fight but never participating. Merely looking to pick off the weak, the wounded.”

  “And we, meanwhile, never thought to look out for the Starkers. They, too, knew the value of taking advantage in a special situation. Someone must have tipped them off as to our activities; we weren’t exactly being secretive or even very careful, assuming our victims would be written off as casualties of drunken brawls. And so, they found us. They tracked us to our hideout, where we stayed during the day.”

  She looked at the floor. “Only Esmerelda and I were there at the time. The rest of the group had stayed elsewhere—they were looking for a new location, someplace we’d be safer, as word of the Starkers’ movement had reached us. It’s ironic, really: we were told to stay behind because it would be safer than moving about with so many Starkers in the area.”

  “What did they do?” Raze whispered. “When they found you.”

  “Very simple,” she replied, barely audible by now. “They dragged her outside into the sun. The area was all but deserted, an old mine which hadn’t been used in years, surrounded by barren land too overworked to be tenable. There was little chance of anyone noticing a vampire burning to death in the sun.”

  Gage made a choked retching sound.

  Raze grimaced, turning his face away.

  “They made me watch,” Naomi wept. “They didn’t kill me; they wanted me to tell the others what they had done, to spread the word of what happened to vampires who became careless. They held me fast, deeper inside the mine where the sun didn’t reach. They even pried my eyes open when I slammed them shut and held a knife to my throat, threatening to drain me if I closed them again. The horror of it—I’ve seen movies,” she said, looking around at us through her tear-filled eyes. “I’ve deliberately gone to terrible, horrible films in the hopes of seeing something more horrible than that. I know it’s ridiculous, but I can’t help hoping that something worse might push the memory of her from my mind and take its place.”

  Tears rolled down my cheeks.

  She looked down at her arms, her hands. “Her smooth skin bubbled and blistered. The blisters popped and oozed blood and pus, dripping onto the ground, splattering on her skirt and shirtwaist. Her beautiful face went black, charred like burnt wood. Her thick, black hair fell out in clumps and turned to dust, and her scalp blistered and popped and split open. She screamed all the while. Shrieked, blubbered, sounds I sometimes hear when I’m alone. When it’s quiet. Her screams. They only stopped when she was dead, and the men who had dragged her from the mine let her body fall to the ground. It soon turned to ash and blew away. As though she had never existed.”

  I felt sick. I was fairly sure we all did by the end of the story.

  “Did you wait for the others to return?” Gage asked. His voice was tired, strained, lifeless.

  “No, something told me they would be back. If they knew we’d been staying there, the chances of the others returning were good. Why would the Starkers not wait for their return, then? The perfect chance to wipe out a dozen vampires in one fell swoop.” She sighed, shaking her head. “I don’t know what became of them. My friends. Perhaps they escaped, perhaps they met the fate Esmerelda had. I wished I could warn them, but it was a matter of self-preservation by then. I waited until the sun went down and ran. I didn’t stop running until I reached Paris.”

  I glanced at Gage. His face mirrored my horror.

  She chuckled. “Ironic, since that happens to be where Queen Isabella was exiled after the revolution. For a time, I felt as though I was in exile, too.”

  Her gaze fell on all of us in turn. “They took that beautiful, exquisite creature and reduced her to nothing more than a screaming animal begging to be spared a horrific death. It wasn’t her fault she’d become who she was. Someone had taken advantage of her—a young, beautiful girl, innocent of the world’s evils. She had only fought to survive since then. But did the Starkers care? Did they ask why she did what she did, how sh
e had turned to vampirism? No. They didn’t even kill her swiftly, which would have been a mercy. So I want them dead. It’s as simple as that.”

  Raze looked at me. “Ironic that the daughter of a vampire killer happens to be a vampire.”

  I gasped. “You think it’s funny? You think you’re clever, making a little quip like that? One of Raze’s quips? You wouldn’t think it was quip-worthy if you knew what they have in mind.”

  I burst into sobs. There it was. I had blurted it out and there was no taking it back. I had to tell them, as much as it hurt to do it.

  “What they have in mind?” Gage asked. “What?”

  I looked at him, his face blurry thanks to my tears. How could I break his heart this way? And I wasn’t even able to reach for him, to beg him to forgive me for something I couldn’t control. To beg him to hold me.

  “He wants to create a so-called cure for vampirism,” I announced. “He wants to use the three of you in experiments, and to give the cure to me. So he can turn me back into a human.”

  36

  Anton

  Genevieve had to be somewhere. She just had to be.

  No matter what they’d done to her, they couldn’t have made her disappear. They must have stashed her somewhere, hidden her from my view.

  I spent the night and the entire morning looking for Genevieve, sniffing around, listening as hard as my wolf ears would allow. Desperate for any sign of her, any hint of her location.

  Any hint that she was still alive.

  Whoever had taken her was smart. They knew how to hide her scent. Skilled at throwing off the efforts of someone trying to track her. Or any of them, for that matter—I couldn’t smell the other shifters anymore, either. There was nothing.

  I’d never known such agonizing frustration, such helplessness. She needed me, and there was nothing I could do.

  It wasn’t until the sun had already moved well past its overhead position that I remembered the meeting with my father and anyone else he’d seen fit to invite. I ran back to the castle in spite of every instinct telling me to continue the search for Genevieve, making short work of returning through the tunnels and dungeons.