Oops. I’d missed something. From the sounds of it, it had been big. I was beginning to think Zane wasn’t very bright. People who threatened Marco tended not to live long. So I’d heard, anyway. He’d always been gentle as a lamb with me.
“It is when you’re handicapped.”
The smug satisfaction in Zane’s voice should’ve sounded a clear warning of his plans.
The world leapt into a frenzy of movement. A shot rang out. Marco’s torso snapped around. Eric dropped out of sight, taking Elizabet with him. Jason shoved his way out of the car as beings of all shapes and forms poured into the clearing. The report of a second shot barked. I caught the flash from a muzzle out of the corner of my eye and had only a moment to catalog it (top story, right-hand window) before Nathaniel’s hand came out of nowhere and pushed my head firmly into the driver’s seat.
“Stay here,” he hissed, and then he was gone, too.
A third shot hit the windshield and thudded into the backseat. I screamed and reflexively covered my head with my hands. The noise was lost in the chaos surrounding the car. Something heavy landed against its side, rocking it onto two wheels. I slid head first toward the driver’s side door, scrambling for purchase along the way. The top of my head connected with the door, shooting pain along the impact point and down my neck.
The car dropped onto all four wheels, rocked back and forth twice, and finally stilled. I pushed myself gingerly away from the door, prodded my head with shaky fingers, and encountered a sticky, wet mess.
Eric had promised we weren’t all going to die tonight. If he was wrong, I was gonna kill him.
Another shot rang out, followed by a startled yelp. An animal, I thought dimly, and pulled myself upright using whatever leverage my hands could find. I stared out the cracked windshield at the battle taking place in the dimly lit clearing. Marco was dragging two limp wolves by the scruff of their necks to the edge of the woods. Elizabet swiped a clawed hand through the gut of a vampire I didn’t recognize, spraying blood and unknown bodily fluids into the air. Therese and Marlene were surrounded by half a dozen wolves.
I figured they had the advantage there. The two vampires might look like fragile flowers, but they were every bit as deadly as the vampires of legend.
My gaze was drawn to a shadow inching its way up the corner support of the porch, below where I’d seen that flash. In the window, I could barely make out a dark form pointing a rifle at the combatants. The shadow crawled into the moonlight draped across the porch’s roof and became Nathaniel. The rifle’s barrel slowly raised, coming nearly level. I glanced across the yard, searching for the target, and attempted to calculate the trajectory of the shot. I’d been good at that once, in the Before. The answer eluded me now, crowded out by the shadows or the worry or who knew what. My focus was gone, and it wasn’t important anyway. What mattered was getting Willow back and everybody making it through this without sustaining any more injuries.
The rifle boomed. Almost instantly, a bullet pinged off the hood of the car. I cursed my own stupidity (What had possessed me to sit upright in clear sight of the shooter after a bullet had shattered the windshield?) and jerked my gaze to the window. Nathaniel had a hand on the rifle’s barrel. He yanked and out came the shooter, landing across the sill with her legs remaining inside. Nathaniel released the gun and gripped the shooter’s hair, yanked again and sent her tumbling over the roof’s edge. She landed with a thud that was clearly audible over the din of the fighting. Nathaniel disappeared into the open window and I lost sight of him.
A scream to my left ended in a gargle. My heart leapt into my throat. I scrambled into the driver’s seat and franticly searched the darkness for the source of the scream. Another came from my right. I twisted around in time to see Alice drop under the running leap of a large, white wolf. Gregory’s fist reared back, but the blow never landed. Something caught him in the back, I couldn’t tell what. He arched forward, eyes wide, and a thin thread of blood trickled slowly out of the corner of his mouth.
I clenched my hands into tight fists as he staggered sideways and fell, leaving a clear view of Eric and Jason fighting back to back, their arms and hands blurring as they countered the vicious swipes of a group of vampires and half-transformed werewolves.
Why in God’s name were there so many of them? Where was Darien with his group of werewolves?
Someone’s hand came in under Eric’s defenses and hit him in the ribs exactly where he’d been injured earlier that evening. He grunted and dropped his blocking arm. A fist connected with his jaw, swinging his head around. He stumbled backward into Jason, knocking our favorite forward, and the whole group collapsed into a tangled heap of flaying arms and legs.
Chapter Eleven
I fumbled with the door handle, shoved my shoulder into the door. It wouldn’t budge. I tried again, and again, the door held. Oh, God. Whatever hit the car earlier must’ve damaged the door, wedging it permanently shut.
I slid across the console into the driver’s seat and out that door. The minute my feet hit the ground, I jolted into a run. The abrupt movement sent a ricochet of pain through my skull. I ignored it and swerved through the fights taking place, passing around Elizabet gutting another vampire, Marco punching an iron-like fist into the face of a wolf, and three pets attempting to fend off a werewolf in that odd humanoid form.
Ahead of me, Alice lay on the ground, as still as the dead. Four claw marks ran in a jagged path across her cheek, oozing blood into her mouth and over her nose. I crouched at her side and checked for a pulse, and sagged across her when my fingertips found a faint flutter.
She groaned as her china blue eyes blinked open and focused on me. “Gregory?”
I refused to look his way. I didn’t need to. Blood trickling out of a human’s mouth, even one infused with a vampire’s blood, was never a good thing. “Hurt. Can you help him?”
“Yes.” She rolled onto her side and must’ve caught sight of his limp form resting a few feet away. A small sob escaped her throat. She pushed herself onto her hands and knees and crawled to him. “Gregory? Wake up, my love. Please God, wake up.”
I crawled after her and knelt beside them. The need to find Eric and Jason throbbed through me. I pushed it down. They had each other. Alice had no one, not with Gregory out cold. “Is he alive?”
“Just.” She raised a trembling hand to her mouth and bit into her wrist, then held the dripping wound over his mouth. “You’re not supposed to be out here, Gianna.”
“Eric and Jason went down.” I risked a glance their way. The group had reformed into sections, Jason in the center of one, Eric at the heart of the other, each one surrounded by too many enemies. “I need to help them.”
“Go,” she said. “Save them if you can.”
The sorrow in her voice was heartbreaking. I kissed her temple, offered a silent prayer for her and Gregory, then launched myself in the direction of my husbands, my long strides eating up the distance between us.
A handful of paces shy of their position, a bulky form materialized out of the edge of the woods and tackled me to the ground with dizzying speed. I landed with an oomph under the man’s weight. He slid off me, leaving enough space for me to squirm onto my stomach and kick my way free of him. A hard hand came down on my ankle. I kicked backward again and again, but the hand held firm. I glanced back and a cold chill shuddered through me.
Zane.
A bruise blossomed along his jaw under the angry glow of black eyes. Otherwise he appeared unfortunately hale. I ground my teeth together and lashed out with my other foot, catching his forearm with the edge of my boot.
He grinned and dragged me toward him by my ankle. “Hello, little Gianna. I’ve waited a long time to get my hands on you.”
“Well, you can just get them back off again.” I wiggled onto my back and yanked my foot away, and nearly screamed when his hold refused to break. “What the hell is wrong with you, anyway? Do you really want a war because you can’t put your dick in the right
hole?”
His expression darkened. With one firm pull, he dragged me the rest of the way to him and dropped full-body on top of me between my thighs. I punched my fist into his ribs, earned a muffled grunt, and just for the hell of it, hit him again.
It felt damn good, too, bruised knuckles and all.
He wedged his face into my throat and bit into my pulse. Excruciating agony ripped through me and I stilled. Blood dribbled out of me and into his mouth far faster than it ever did for Eric and Jason. A flash of panic thrummed through me. “Stop, please,” I whispered hoarsely. “I’m too young to give that much.”
He mmmd and dug his fangs deeper into my skin, and a fresh spurt of blood gushed through the puncture marks he’d made. Air rushed past my lips, thick and cloying, and my heart thudded in a rapid clip against my sternum. He was killing me, deliberately glutting himself with my blood simply so he could deprive me of it.
He didn’t need it, didn’t need it, didntneedit.
I curled my fingers into a fist, punched weakly at his ribs. The blow bounced off. My hand dropped to my side, useless, useless. What good would hitting him do, anyway? He was bigger, stronger, meaner, and I hadn’t even started training yet, hadn’t landed the first blow on a punching bag, hadn’t worn the gym clothes Jason had helped me pick out, not once.
The shadows jittered uneasily in my mind. I beckoned them forward, hoping I could use their strength to bolster my own and maybe at least push Zane off of me. They refused my summons, shrinking into a black mass a quarter their normal size.
I would’ve laughed if my strength wasn’t ebbing away faster than I could gather it. It slipped out of me along with my blood, creeping away just when I needed it most, leaving me so tired I could barely think.
Zane’s hips thrust into mine. It took me a moment to realize the hard length pressing so intimately against me through our jeans was his erection. Vampires needed sex to control the bloodlust. Zane might only be a pet, but the urge he had to combine the two was probably ingrained.
The good ol’ suck and fuck.
I did laugh then, a thready whisper of sound that barely escaped the remnants of my throat.
Zane’s tongue laved over my skin and he pulled away, bracing himself above me on his forearms. He thrust his hips into mine again. “You like that?”
I didn’t have the strength to tell him no and my head seemed stuck to the ground, too heavy for a simple shake.
He stared down at me for a long moment as the fighting continued around us unabated. “I always liked you, before. I wanted to approach you, maybe see if you’d like to join with me instead of Eric, but Selena said no. She wanted him. You were in her way.”
So she’d tried to kill me or force me into becoming a vampire, depending on the perspective. Out of the darkness, an image shimmered to life behind Zane, sharpening into Selena as I’d last seen her, my blood staining her mouth, my family’s deaths on her hands. She wore a viciously cold smile under glittering eyes.
She wasn’t real.
Jason and Eric had watched her die.
She couldn’t hurt me anymore.
I clung to those thoughts with everything I had left and prayed they were true.
“I never liked how she went after your family.” He shifted over me and brushed a hand over my forehead, smoothing the disheveled curls away from my face. “It’s not too late for you, Gianna. I can give you my blood, replenish your life force. We could leave here, take Willow and run. It doesn’t have to end this way.”
“Why?” I croaked out.
He shrugged. “Because your leaving voluntarily would hurt Eric more than killing you would.”
And it was all about hurting my husband, repaying him for something he’d had no hand in as far as I could tell. Devin hadn’t left Zane so much as Zane had outgrown his sponsor into the Vampyr. I doubted that was a distinction Zane had ever made.
He slashed across the pulse in his throat with a clawed thumbnail. “Take what you need. Be a good girl and think about what’s happening here. Eric and Jason are outnumbered, Alice and her pet are near death, Elizabet’s fallen and so has Marlene. How many more have to die today when you could save them, just by agreeing to come with me?”
If I’d been able, I would’ve turned my head away. He took the lack of movement as consent and lowered his throat to my mouth. My nostrils flared as I inhaled the scent of his blood and sweat and the sweetly delicious smell of his arousal. Of its own accord, my tongue flicked out, stroking along his skin, taking the blood he offered so freely. He moaned and rubbed his erection across the juncture of my thighs.
No, no, no. That wasn’t something I wanted. A dim part of my mind urged me to take it anyway, to sacrifice conviction and loyalty, to survive.
I dug my fangs into his pulse, withdrew. The dots of blood welling up were in no way a match for the hunger roaring to life within me. I struck, hard and fast, drawing a flinch from him. Blood lashed across my tongue, rich, intricate, deeply nuanced. I latched onto the cut and suckled, swallowing his life force as quickly as my mouth filled with it. It slid down my throat in a hot stream, soaking into my blood-starved organs, and I welcomed it.
The shadows found their courage and surged into the forefront of my mind, imbuing me with the strength I’d needed so badly only moments before. I started to beat them back with the force of my will, then hesitated. Sex was absolutely not an option here no matter what Zane thought, and I wasn’t ready to give myself over to the shadows, not quite yet. I needed more time and a lot more blood before I’d be strong enough to fight him off.
The solution hit me with the weight of a Mack truck. If I’d been able, I would’ve smacked myself. I settled for calling myself an idiot. What had I been using this whole time to control the shadows? Not sex necessarily, but memory.
Why hadn’t I thought of that before?
I flexed my hand, testing my ability to move, and inched it up Zane’s ribs.
“Mmm, yes,” he said. “Touch me.”
I ignored him and concentrated on getting my hand around his nape. Just one, that’s all I needed. Just one hand at his nape to hold him in place when my strength returned. Just one hand kept there while memory worked its magic and I reclaimed the blood he’d stolen.
I pushed my hand between us and finally curled my fingers around the neck of his t-shirt near his nape, anchoring them in place. That would have to do. I swallowed one more mouthful, looped Eric’s bond around my mind, and plunged into the seat of Zane’s emotions, the one place nobody in the Vampyr could hide from me.
Instantly, I was surrounded by amorphous blobs of memories. I flipped past the happy ones. The first time he’d met Devin, his mother’s smiling praise, memory after memory of me going about my daily routine, as if he’d watched me for a long, long time. I shuddered and pressed on, pausing at a memory of Selena burning under a harsh noonday sun that was attached to what seemed like an unusual amount satisfaction. I examined that one for a moment and discovered a deep-seated loathing of the vampire, living brightly within Zane’s heart.
If he’d hated her so much, why had he worked with her to bring Eric down?
Oh, right. Because he wanted Devin. My brain must’ve drained out along with my blood. Thankfully, it was starting to come back, though I still felt as dumb as a turnip.
I pushed that memory away and searched for something darker, something that would hurt Zane or maybe throw him off balance, and nearly slid by his first day under the control of the female werewolves. This one had a jagged feel to it. I opened it carefully, inching my way in…
(…holy fucking God. Darien staring down at me, eyes hard, merciless. Don’t try to escape. We enjoy chasing our prey…)
Above me, Zane jerked and I nearly lost my grip on his shirt.
“What are you doing, Gianna?” he asked, and for the first time, I heard real fear in his voice.
I wound my legs around his and yanked the memory out, blowing it up so large, he couldn’t possibly ignore it�
�
(…a grating laugh, claws raking down my bare skin, teeth scraping over my dick…)
Immersing him in it and me with him, drawing the details out into vivid reality…
(…my turn, come in me, here little vampie, rough hands, too many, too many, toomany…)
I fed the shadows into memory, amplifying the fear, massaging it into outright terror. Zane reared back. I followed, clinging to him with my hand and mouth and legs. He wound the fingers of both hands into my hair and tugged sharply, and I nearly lost my hold on him.
Fuck that.
I willed the claws to spring from my fingertips, swung my free hand back, and stabbed the pointed talons into the skin covering his ribs, and I remembered. Selena above me, her claws ripping through my skin. My parents dead on the whim of a madwoman. My sister, her lifeless eyes hollow and empty. And Willow, my sweet baby, stolen from her parents in a fit of jealousy.
Fury erupted within me, shattering my grip on Zane’s memory. I drew back and struck again, slashing in a long swipe down his side. His scream rang in my ear, followed by a numb buzz. I squinched my eyes closed and channeled every bit of helpless rage, every bit of sorrow and loss; everything this man and his former mistress had done to me and mine, I dredged up, crammed it into a wad, and thrust it into him.
His body shuddered in my grip, then went limp. I let go and pushed myself away, barely clearing him before he landed in the sparse grass. Behind him, Selena’s image flickered and winked out, forever lost, I hoped, under the damage done to the seat of Zane’s emotions.
I swiped the back of my hand over my mouth. The shadows roiled through my mind, sweeping me along with them, not quite taking over. My mind was still coiled around Eric’s bond with me. It was all that had saved me from giving in completely to the shadows.
I almost let go, almost turned myself over to them and the wild rage flashing and weaving its way through my veins. Zane stirred and groaned, and I forced myself to crawl to him. He was alive. I wanted him to stay that way. A quick death was too good for him. He deserved to suffer, long and slowly and as painfully as possible. For that, he needed to live, and if I wanted to watch it, the shadows couldn’t hold me, not all of me. I forced them back, forced myself to control them on my own without using sex or memory or another person’s strength.
The New Vampire Page 27
