Andre ignored her, addressing his question to Bel. “Have you tested it?”
“Not yet, but I engineered the protein to be chemically identical to the hemoaurum in Hunter blood and Blood Vine.”
“You young ones are thinking you can know everything.” Uta shook her head in an infuriating display of pity.
“I’ll begin clinical trials right away.”
“Why you are bothering? I am saying it not work.”
Bel’s fingers twitched with the need to wring her neck, and he shot out of his chair.
Andre pushed him back. “Don’t listen to her. You are the scientist. I trust you.”
Bel tipped his head in a bow to Andre before turning back to her. “Well, this has been fun. Let’s do it again in another hundred and seventy years. And in the meantime, have a nice life.”
Uta clicked her tongue. “If I am helping it, we are not seeing each other ever again.”
He exhaled with relief, but a hollow pit opened up in his gut and goose bumps rose up on every millimeter of his body, like even his skin strained toward her.
She blurred to him vampire-fast, narrowing her eyes and running one shiny red fingernail up the length of his hard-on. “Are you longing for me, Bel?” She spoke in a false whisper, loud enough even Lena could hear.
He refused to reply, but it didn’t matter. The answer pressed through his jeans.
“Good. Now you are knowing how I feel. Ten years since your Lexi is long time. I am having no relief since you are born. Welcome to my nightmare.”
He stood, frozen, grasping to make sense of her words. How did she know so much about him?
She stepped back and strode to the door, calling over her shoulder. “I go home. Andre, your duties with Justicia beginning immediately. You are expecting call from Loki.” And then she was gone.
Bel closed his eyes and slumped into his chair, aching like every part of his body had been for a ride on a different roller coaster. He’d never felt so tired, and the fatigue mired his thoughts. Yet one thing was clear. In just a few words she’d explained the mystery he’d obsessed over for a century, and the explanation had done nothing to fill up the hollow inside him because the emptiness wasn’t a gap in his knowledge after all—it was the lack of Uta herself, a vacancy that gnawed at him from the inside. That had been eating him alive from the day she’d rejected him, and he hadn’t even known why.
A chair scraped on the floor, and he opened his eyes. Everyone stared at him, their faces masks of horrified pity. Well, didn’t that just make it a thousand times worse? He rose on wobbly knees and hobbled to the bar. The sharp smell of bourbon cleared his head, and he poured a whole highball of the nectar.
Steadier, he carried the glass back to the table, welcomed by the same wincing expressions. “Shite. Don’t look at me like that.”
Andre inhaled like he was preparing for a speech. “Bel, this is—”
Kos exploded in a fit of giggles. “Ten years?”
Oh hell no, Bel so did not want to talk about his sex life. He held up his palms, hoping to silence them. But Kos cast him a sidelong glance, winking.
When Bel grasped his brother’s meaning, his bunched up shoulders relaxed and he smiled, grateful for the distraction of brotherly ribbing.
Andre chuckled. He must have caught onto Kos’s strategy. “Indeed, son, that is rather impressive. Even I never made it that long.” He pressed his lips together in an obvious attempt to suppress a smile. Bel’s hand clenched into a fist, wanting to punch Andre even if they were trying to make him feel better.
Zoey surprised him by jumping into the fray. “No wonder you think the whole vampires-not-being-able-to-masturbate thing is a fate worse than death.”
Ouch. A low blow. She fit right into his family. He raised his glass to her. “Damn straight, Zoey. Which is why Uta is screwed, and I will be fine.”
Chapter 2
THE BOAT BOUNCED over each wave, its hull slamming down again and again onto the choppy water like a thoughtless lover. Rotten, windy night for a cruise on the North Sea.
But the sky was clear, and this far from the light-saturated coast the stars shone brightly, taunting Uta. She refused to look. Stargazing belonged to another time, to the blink-brief years of her friendship with a young Bel, when they had stared at the night sky and talked of the greatest, and the smallest, things. Since she’d had to send him away, each point of light was a needle stabbing into her heart.
Runny sheep shit. Maudlin self-pity was the least attractive trait a creature could possess. Time for the much-needed distraction of battle.
An icy gust blew off the water, and Uta hugged herself, shivering.
“Perhaps you should dress like a soldier,” Oblak said in their native Croatian, “and not like a paramour on a lunch date.”
She shot her arm out and smacked his temple with the back of her fingers. “I did not ask your opinion.”
He chuckled as the shore came into view. From the hauntingly beautiful windswept dunes, plume after plume of smoke billowed, white under a bright sliver of moon in a clear sky. To the east, the lighthouse still stood—for the moment.
At dawn Caspar had reported the arrival of Hunters on his sparsely populated island. Over the course of the day, the enemy had demolished all the boats in the harbor and incinerated every house on the beach. Fortunately, the dwellings were summer cottages, left vacant with the arrival of fall so that only Caspar’s vampire household remained. In all her years on the Justicia, Uta had never seen Hunters wreak such wanton destruction, acting without any regard for what the civil authorities would make of the violence. It did not bode well for the trajectory of Bennett’s escalating war. Twenty vampire households had been destroyed or rescued by Uta’s evac unit in the thirty days since she’d seen Bel at Andre’s estate.
She had convened her unit on the mainland and waited for sunset while the household hid in Caspar’s private keep, built into a cavern far below the base of the lighthouse. If they survived the day, they would ascend a secret staircase into the dunes and Uta’s soldiers could collect them.
“I expect by now the sons of bitches know where Caspar is hiding,” Oblak said.
“Yes.” She hefted the satchel of C4, plus a detonator he had wired for her, and turned to face the other vampires. “Remember my instructions. I will wait for your signal before I blow the roaches up.”
Five solemn faces nodded, exhausted by the endless stream of rescues they’d undertaken in the last month. She could not begrudge them their fatigue, a mirror of her own, but it was a liability in battle.
“Perk up, you melancholy goats,” she commanded. “You are the heroes in this quagmire of a war. Tonight we save lives.”
They rolled their eyes and grumbled, but the mood lightened. She gave them an exaggerated salute and turned, bending her knees and launching into the freezing air.
The wind stung her eyes and numbed her fingers as she flew circles over the island. Her hair came loose from its tie and blew about her like sea grass. Shoving it back with her forearm, she scanned the ground for Hunters scurrying in the night, but nothing moved on the grassy dunes.
Four trucks were scattered like dice in the sandy lot surrounding the lighthouse. The tower itself looked identical to drawings she had examined—a sheer, white, straight-sided exterior. The lantern was encased within large, thick, stormproof panes. From the catwalk, one of the panes would open to give her access to the interior.
By all appearances, her plan was foolproof. They very nearly always were.
She alighted on the steel handholds of the catwalk and pressed her palms onto the glass to open it. It shook once, the tremble accompanied by a loud bang. After a short pause, a bang sounded again, and after another pause of the same duration came a third powerful slam. That time, the entire edifice shuddered and groaned. The Hunters were battering at the door into Caspar’s keep. How medieval. He had said it was a thick door.
Offshore, two yellow rubber dinghies cut rapid lines
across the rough sea. When they beached, the vampires stormed over the dark dunes. Uta’s keen eyes could barely discern the shadows of the householders moving toward them.
Or were those Hunters ambushing her soldiers? Sheep shit. Had she led her unit into slaughter? Would they even smell the scent of their enemies over the smoke blowing across the island and onto the sea?
One of the black-clad figures raised an arm, and a moment later a flare arced into the sky—the signal.
All was well.
She released a breath, and then, from the narrow catwalk, she stepped inside the lighthouse and considered the rotating lamp, its glaring beacon flashing through the panels of the lens. She had planned to make a dramatic entrance by hurling it down at the Hunters, but thick heat filled the glass room like a sauna. The lens itself would be scorching. She spit on her hands and reached for it anyway. The damn thing seared her fingertips, and she fanned them in the cool air as they healed. There had to be a less excruciating way to get the Hunters’ attention.
She turned back to the storm pane she had come through. A sheet of glass taller than her and four feet wide would draw their notice if she dropped it on them. She yanked it off the hinges and used the pointy toe of her Ferragamo to raise the trapdoor, which opened onto stairs circling the interior wall. She peered down the wide-open center of the column. Forty feet below, the Hunters operated the battering ram in sync.
It required some finesse to angle the glass pane through the trap door without shouting a single curse, but once it was free she did not need to hold her tongue.
“You seem to have forgotten to mail my invitation to the party.” She spoke in Croatian, although these Hunters were likely local, from Denmark or Sweden, perhaps.
They looked up all at once. Astonishment twisted into hatred on their faces. Men, young and middle-aged, on the Hunt and full of genocidal blood lust.
Their fervency repulsed her, and she heaved the storm pane down with precision, aiming for two Hunters on the opposite side of the tower. It severed both their heads at once before it shattered against a pile of driftwood. They were probably planning to set the whole place ablaze with that kindling.
The remaining Hunters—ten or so—dropped the ram and reached for their machine guns. Uta tensed. She hated those things. The only firearm that could disable a vampire, their bullets stung like a motherfucking hornet. Her body tugged at her to shrink back from view, but she stood firm and called out in Danish.
“Come and get me.”
One of the Hunters fired upward, and she gave in to instinct, plastering herself against the wall. Footsteps pounded on the wooden stairs and echoed deafeningly in the confined space. She counted to five, pulled the explosive device from its case, and tossed it down into the well of the lighthouse.
One. Two. Three.
It was time to go. Oblak had predicted the barrel of the lighthouse would turn into a cannon and shoot the Hunters and all the debris into the sky. She had a mind to watch that from the air. But the bomb ticking away at the bottom of the tower beckoned to her.
So what if ten more Hunters would soon be dead? One more household was relegated to exile. Nothing had been accomplished, and she would have to do it all again tomorrow. And worse, since seeing Bel at Kaštel, the ceaseless cycle of violence was no longer distraction enough to keep her longing for him at bay.
A familiar urge, nearly as old as Bel himself, gripped her, and she folded at the waist. She could dive right down as if it were a plunge into the warm waters of the Adriatic. Surely the blast would spark the driftwood and set the wooden stairwell aflame. She could throw herself into the blaze and her suffering would be over in seconds.
But it would hurt Bel so badly he would wish he had died. Loki would know it was not an accident, and he would never forgive her. He would probably sorely punish Oblak, too. She stood and took one backward step toward the lamp room, resolved to keep fighting, for now.
The sound of the blast caught her off guard, but before it hit her head on, she dropped from the ledge and rode the wave of hot air upward. Mere feet from the vent cap of the lighthouse, she somersaulted backward and her shoes slammed against its surface just as it was blown off the building. She rocketed through the night sky, crouching feet first inside the airborne cap, which landed with a thud, nose-down in the sand. Dusting off her slacks, she arose from the unexpected conveyance like Botticelli’s Venus from her seashell. Uta the barn cat, always landing on her feet.
Oblak blurred to her side. “What the hell happened? You had plenty of time to get out.”
“I got distracted.”
He snorted. “Loki told me about your death wish, but I didn’t believe him.”
“Do not be foolish. I was simply curious what an explosion such as that would feel like.”
“And?”
“Better than surfing a very large wave.”
He shook his head, turning without another word and ambling toward one of the dinghies. She followed. They had just enough time to make it to Loki’s before dawn.
Chapter 3
AFTER A SHOWER and a change of clothes, she kicked her feet up on Loki’s couch. Her thoughts slogged through her brain and her belly growled, but she could not be bothered to get up and search out a meal, so she simply stared out the window. Over a white blanket of snow, daylight arrived very early in Norway, which made it an absurd place for a vampire to live. She despised its cold, its isolation, its damn stupid-sounding language. The sky reflected pink on the still water of his little fjord. Loki’s house was oddly quiet, and she jittered with post-battle adrenaline. Only the sound of her nickel-plated knitting needles could soothe her frenetic mind.
She reached for her needles and tried not to think about diving into an explosion, tried not to think about Bel.
Click, click, click.
One thing to recommend Norway was the sheep—she never ran out of yarn.
She straightened the swath of navy blue blanket she’d already knitted, and her fire-engine red toenails peeked out from underneath it. A fleck of missing polish marred her right middle toe. She jabbed her needle into the couch cushion. Damn it, she’d just had that pedicure. Human cosmetics never withstood her duties.
Click, click, click.
The next time she glanced up, Loki was perched cross-legged in a chair, his ageless face in repose.
Her tongue tangled, struggling to call up words from the recesses of her mind. She had been speaking Croatian so often with her unit that the strange vowels of Norwegian, with all its fjords and Bjorks, filled her mouth like swallows of blood and flubbed her syllables. Still, she spoke it much better than English.
“News?” she asked.
“Yes.” His word hung heavy in the air.
She didn’t look up. Click, click, click. Just a few more rows and one more blanket would be complete.
“But before I tell you, you must feed. Oblak said you were injured.”
She listened for an accusation, but heard none. “No.” The intimacy of feeding grated on her since seeing Bel last month. He hated her, would never freely want her, and Uta found it unbearable to be so near to anyone else.
Loki flashed to her side so fast even her ancient eyes could not track him. “It has been too long.” He cupped her face, forcing her to make eye contact. The prehistoric little male, perhaps a full foot shorter than her and impossibly boyish, employed a fatherly tone.
“Uta, I need you strong.” He snapped his fingers, and Nils, the finest piece of male flesh Loki employed, appeared in a doorway.
His face was all sharp Scandinavian lines, the planes of his chest shown off by a handsome sweater. Had she made that? It was impractical to keep track of these things. But the raglan looked good, he looked good, and her stomach growled at the musky evergreen scent radiating from him.
“Fine. I will eat.”
With a buoyant step, he crossed to the couch and raised his eyebrows in invitation. She’d fed from him many times before, but not since her reuni
on with Bel—not since her body had been awakened to desires she’d buried for decades, which made this a bad idea.
“I can’t.”
“You must, Uta.” Loki flashed to Nils and pierced the human’s finger with a fang, tempting her with the iron scent.
When the human tilted his neck submissively, she was too hungry to resist. Straddling his hips, she perched herself on his lap and licked a long line up a secondary artery, its salty pulse calling to her tongue through his skin. She sank her fangs into him, the gush of blood sending delicious heat down her throat.
Experienced servants like Nils knew how to control their response to the bliss of a vampire bite. But Uta was old. Very old. And her bite was off-the-charts powerful on the bite-pleasure scale. So it took all of two seconds for the human’s cock to harden, pressing against her pubic bone—against flesh that instantly flushed and tingled in a painful taunt. She could push his erection into her pička and grind on top of him for hours, and she’d never find relief. Only her bonded mate, only Bel, could satisfy her.
And since that wasn’t going to happen, it was better to feel nothing at all.
She sucked down one more desperate swallow of blood before licking Nils’s wounds closed. Pulling away, she examined his face. She’d hardly taken any blood, but a vampire must always ensure the health of the household. His eyes had glazed and his cheeks glowed a lusty pink. She’d give anything, her very life, to see that look on Bel’s face just once.
Nils’s eyes widened ever so slightly as if he could read her desire on her face. “Uta, I would gladly serve all your needs.”
She shook her head, and he frowned—the second reaction just as slight as the first. A well-trained householder, but he hadn’t managed to hide his hurt. If she were a nice vampire, she’d tell him how truly gorgeous he was and how very much she wished he could give her what she needed.
“Out. I need to speak to Loki.”
When the blood slave exited, Loki clucked, chiding her for misusing his human. Then he powered on a flat screen that hung over his mammoth stone hearth. She hopped to her feet and froze after only one step, paralyzed by the horrific images on the screen—charred human remains, some clearly the blackened skeletons of children. She gasped. A nearly two-thousand-year-long life gave Uta a paradoxical appreciation for the preciousness of childhood.
Blood Reunited Page 2
