Ruan watched Slade’s hand drop to his gun. He paced around the front of Dylan’s desk, his eyes glowing blood-red beneath ReVamp’s amber lab lights. The hatred burning there matched the anger erupting in Ruan’s middle. They didn’t have to be related to the other khiss members to feel like family.
“Savage couldn’t have wiped them all out yet. There have to be hundreds . . . thousands of vamps displaced,” Slade said, once he had Dylan’s attention. “With the mawares protecting ReVamp, we’ve got shelter here, but we can’t house a massive vamp exodus. Where are those poor suckers supposed to go?”
Dylan looked over her shoulder, shooting Ruan a sideways glance.
“Dylan?” Ruan asked, drawing out her name, not sure how to formulate his question. Something about the hard set of her mouth told him she already knew it. “Do you think he knows about the Black Moon haven?”
She shook her head slowly and drew out a long, unsure “No.”
“Is there any way you could get word to them?”
“He couldn’t know. That’s not possible.”
“They should have a monitoring system. Could you see if there’s been any kind of system bleep in Black Moon’s region?”
“Ruan . . .” It was a plea to stop.
He didn’t listen. Instead, he circled her chair and went palms-down on her desk. “It used to be a sort of vamp refugee camp. Hell, vamps could still be headed out there for hope’s sake alone. But you’ve heard the lore about that place. If he gets there . . .” He let his words fall as he thought about Savage’s plans.
Slade slanted Dylan a glance. “If this place is so damn important, why aren’t your fingers buzzing over that keyboard, looking it up like the others?”
Again, Dylan and Ruan’s eyes met.
This time Slade growled in response, breaking their connection. “Someone better tell me what the fuck is going on.”
Dylan focused on the screen again, no doubt searching for signs of Black Moon, just in case things had changed. “Slade, no one knows where the haven is . . . exactly. You have to be formally invited to glimpse it and even then you might not be where you thought you were. Some people say it‘s constantly moving, floating from place to place.”
“Or dimension to dimension,” Ruan finished.
“Sounds damn confusing,” Slade grumbled, stealing what was left of Ruan’s drink and tossing it back. Ice clunked against his teeth.
Lost in thought, Ruan absentmindedly picked up a red stress-ball from Dylan’s desk, gave it a squeeze, and walked backwards until he came to rest on the wall just behind him. He kicked his foot up, focusing far across the lab, where Eve lay quiet and sleeping behind the safety of his office door. If he listened closely, beyond the pecking of the lab clock, and Slade’s gnashing of ice chunks, he could hear Eve‘s heartbeat, strong and true. He squeezed the hell out of the ball, his fingers tensing, squishing in, then relaxing and pushing out.
“If Savage is silencing the network and destroying havens,” Ruan said. “Black Moon would be the ultimate trophy. A challenge. The vamp version of Atlantis.”
Dylan sighed. “If the lore is true, think of everything that could be lost.”
She was right. Rumors of Black Moon’s khissmates gaining eternal life, healing powers, or enhanced mawares had reached far and wide. They were documented everywhere, though most believed the stories were more fairy tale than fact. Ruan had heard that once you’re inducted into the khiss, you become forever loyal to the haven, happily giving up individual rights for the greater good. He’d heard talk of missionaries and religious fanaticism. Of angels and demons, vampires and therians, and paranormal creatures of which he could never dream.
But most of all, those things were just rumors. Because anyone who went into the haven at Black Moon never came back. Whether they were killed or simply vanished like the haven itself, its secrets had never been totally revealed. Sure, crazies claimed to have gone there and been dismissed, but they were locked away in loony bins, having gone totally mental. Some letters were found a few years back, supposedly written by a long-standing khissmate, but it was quickly destroyed and the author dropped off the planet.
“You’re right,” Ruan said, pulling his cell out of his back pocket. “There could be more to lose than we know. Savage is always thinking of everything he could gain, and in this case the possibilities really are endless. He may not be heading that way, but keep trying to touch base with them anyway. If this place keeps disappearing, we may never have a shot at getting the answers we need, but we have to try. We just have to hope it’s not too late.”
“Speaking of disappearing,” Slade piped up, his eyes darkening from red to tar-black. “Where’s that Damian fool? Thought you took off to the market with him.”
“Dante,” Ruan corrected, knowing damn well Slade remembered his name. Prick. He checked his cell’s no messages light for the umpteenth time. “I haven‘t heard from him.”
“You must be heartbroken.”
Half-laughing, Ruan stalked to his office, ignoring Slade and Dylan’s low banter the entire way. He hesitated at the door, hand to knob, glad to know that even after all they‘d been through recently, it didn‘t take more than one of Slade’s smart-ass remarks to lighten the mood.
Just to be sure, Ruan checked his phone again. No texts. No emails. Nothing. Since teleporting from the elder black market with that virginal elder, Ruan hadn’t heard a word from Dante. He’d disappeared . . . vanished into thin air. Literally.
Ruan couldn’t help but wonder how that teleporting gig of his worked. Where he’d end up. What he’d see. Why it took so much out of him. Which got Ruan thinking about his own maware and when he’d start to feel different. Isn’t that how it worked? He’d go to sleep one morning feeling the same as every other, then wake up the next night feeling like a changed man. Born anew. With a maware—what had Lilith said?—that they don’t bestow upon just anyone.
Ruan’s head thrummed with questions. But the one stuck on repeat was whether the maware surging through him would be enough to stop Savage and whatever he had planned.
As he palmed the office door and pushed it open, Eve’s soft sighs of sleep floated to him on a draft of honey-sweet air. He closed his eyes. Breathed her in. She was sleeping so peacefully, curled into a ball beneath a mocha-colored fleece blanket, her head cradled in the crook of her arm. Just how he’d pictured her from the lab. Content beyond belief to snooze in his office while the whole world outside seemed to be shaking with uncertainty.
DANTE THREW UP his hand to guard against another one of her attacks. “You finished yet?”
She thwacked him again, right across the shoulder. And again, upside the back of the head for good measure. She couldn’t have thought she was actually hurting him. “I wasn’t ready to leave, dammit, take me back!”
“That’s not happening.” He shooed her with an annoyed wave of his hand, glad the shakes and chills had finally subsided. “Now just calm down, would you?”
After glaring at him for a few moments, she planted her hands on her hips like a pissed-off little teapot. At least she wasn’t hitting him. He supposed it was progress. To think, not twenty minutes ago at the elder black market, Dante had wanted her hands all over him. Ask and ye shall receive, right?
Stifling a laugh, Dante sat forward on his haunches, rubbed his aching head, and tried to slow her words down. Take me back. “Why on earth would you want to go back there?”
“Why on earth would you think I would need your rescuing?” She mocked him, a stubborn yet downright adorable pout pushing out her heart-shaped lips.
The elder black market wasn’t exactly the slime-slathered gutters of San Francisco, but it was a far cry from the Hilton. She’d been captured. Bound. Restricted from using her mawares. That bastard Juan Carlos was beating her around. She’d been sold, for Christ’s sake!
He’d saved her.
Only as Dante looked around from his squatted position in a mound of wet, muddy earth, spotted an unfamiliar forest and a woman who looked like she’d rather kill him than thank him for removing her from that place, Dante realized he looked more like the one who needed saving.
To hell with that.
Mustering all his strength, Dante tested his legs by shooting one out from beneath him, kneeling on it, then following suit with the other. He crouched in the mud, listening to the elder take sharp, quick breaths over him. When he finally got to his feet, he regained his balance by grasping onto a thick Douglas fir tree on his right. Teleporting always wiped him physically, but this time his head felt painfully muddled. Like he’d chop off his left leg for an adrenaline drip.
Dante looked around. They were in some sort of tiny clearing, surrounded by fir trees with a hollowed-out mud pit in the middle. From where they stood, the forest went uphill in every direction until the land crested just out of sight, no doubt leading to hundreds of other tree rings and mud pits. Thick trunks popped up like daises through moss-clotted earth. No city sounds buzzed on the cool midnight air. Was that salt he picked up on the breeze? Ocean? They were far from San Francisco, Dante figured that much right away. But the ocean? How far had he traveled? Pain seared through his temples. Disorientation must’ve been fucking with his head.
Although teleporting wasn’t an exact science, he’d like to think over his fifty years on this earth he’d learned a thing or two about it. But he’d never, not once, teleported to a place he’d never been.
And for the life of him, he couldn’t remember his head ever hurting so damn much.
“Hel-lo?” she asked, leaning into his line of sight to catch his eye. The long braid of her ponytail swung to and fro like one of those freaky pendulums in psychologists’ offices. His mundane parents had insisted on taking him to dozens of those places throughout his childhood to figure out why he wasn’t “normal” like the rest of the kids. Why doesn’t he sleep? Why doesn’t he ever eat? That was before he realized being abnormal wasn’t always a bad thing.
“I asked you a question,” she said, louder, with more fire behind it. “What the hell kind of right do you have to scoop me up like some knight in shining armor? Did you hear me ask for your help?”
No. He hadn’t. He couldn’t remember hearing much before her voice, actually. Although anger was pitching her tone octaves too high, causing his ears to ring, it was still the most beautifully ringing orchestra he’d ever heard. Like wind chimes blowing in the soft southern breeze. “I thought I was doing you a favor.” He heeled his boot against a tree and scraped off a clod of mud, thinking about how off-target her questions were. She should’ve been asking how he’d teleported. Not why. But he sure as hell wasn’t about to pony up any information she could use against him.
“Some favor,” she said, swiping smatters of dirt off her robe. It was so dirty, the burgundy had turned gunpowder-brown. “Next time you might want to ask the damsel if she’s in distress before you stick your nose where it doesn’t belong.”
With a swish of her braid, Miss Priss hiked up the heavy swells of her robe, spun around, and high-stepped over a fallen log to the outskirt of the circle. As she made her way out of the small ring of fir trees in a very straight and determined line westward, Dante realized he had no idea where the hell he was. Or how to get back to Ruan. Yet she didn’t seem to have any confusion about which way to get out of the thicket. She trudged uphill, in and around scattered rows of trees, with purpose.
Damn it. He was gonna be in trouble deeper than the mud sucking at his boots if he didn’t bring this elder back to help him decipher the scrolls. Don’t let her get away.
He scrubbed his hands over his head. “Son of a bitch.”
“Excuse me?” She whipped around, her robe flaring out in a perfect circle before wrapping around her legs. “What’d you just call me?”
“Shit.” Dante closed his eyes tight and lifted his face to the heavens. “I wasn’t talking to you.”
It wasn’t like he expected solace, at least not from the Big Guy upstairs. But he would’ve appreciated a break every now and again. He would recover from the physical energy-suck. His brain would even shift into high gear at some point and stop grinding gears like a beat-up Pinto. But why did it seem like everything was a fucking battle—waged uphill, staring into the sun—against more powerful enemies using superior weapons?
He didn’t know what he expected when he’d jumped her out of the black market. Maybe some gratitude and a rewarding kiss? Certainly not this . . .
She trudged a few steps back down the hill. “A real man, if he had something to say, wouldn’t wait until a woman turned her back before letting his balls drop.”
Oh, Miss Priss had a mouth. Small pulses of adrenaline tingled across Dante’s chest, settling in his lap. It was like the beginning rush of a fight. An erotic kiss, drawing his mouth open in rebuttal.
Dante took a step closer, holding her mahogany eyes in his sights. “A real man, who saved you from certain death, wouldn’t expect a thank-you in return. He’d rescue your beautiful ass and ride off into the sunset to be virtuous for the sake of virtue.” He advanced, stepping over the same fallen log she had. Shock widened her eyes as he closed the distance between them. She retreated, her back pressing against the wide span of a fir. “A real man wouldn’t try to take advantage of the situation at hand.” She was still as stone, her chin high. Her expression like a marble statue, regal and poised. Her skin glowed luminescent in the soft streams of moonlight peeking between overhead branches. Dante stepped closer still, an odd twinge in his belly humming in anticipation. “But I’m not a real man. I’m not virtuous. And not only would I appreciate a goddamn thank-you for getting you out of that mess, but something tells me you know where we are. Now you’re gonna share that with me or we can keep going round and round all night.”
She shook her head, rubbing it against the bark behind her. Standing over her five-foot-nothin’, hundred-something-bony-pound frame, Dante noticed how so small and fragile she looked, despite the roughness of her mouth. She had a button nose. Heart-shaped lips that turned up at the edges, even without the trace of a smile. Cute, pointed chin. Looking down upon her, nothing but a breath between them, Dante could hear the flutter of her heartbeat pattering like a bird in the canopy above their heads.
“You know where we are.” He was certain of it. “You’ve been here before.”
“No. You’re wrong.”
“And you’re a horrible liar.”
“You have no idea what you’ve done.” Her breath caught as he pressed against her. The cool glimmer in her eyes simmered down.
“Why not tell me so I can get the hell out of here and away from you.” Oh, how things had changed. To think . . . he’d actually felt something for this elder at the black market. Now, looking into the hard glare in her eyes, Dante realized the feeling he had must’ve been pure pity. She wasn’t strong. She wasn’t a woman to be respected, refusing to give her name when threatened. She was just a spoiled brat with mud on her robe and a chip on her shoulder. “The least you could do is point me in the right direction.”
“Go to hell.” She slipped around the tree and took off up the hill at a dead sprint.
Dante sighed, chewed on his lip and his options. Even if his energy was restored full-force, could he risk teleporting somewhere else—to somewhere he knew? What if he’d jumped to a different dimension completely? Where would he be then? He may never find his way back. And he needed to find a way to contact Ruan. He pulled his cell out of his pocket and tossed it into the mud pit he’d just stepped out of. Another jump, another dead phone. This shit was getting expensive. AT & T was going to own his ass.
Just when Dante thought he was going to have to follow the elder and come up with some sort of pathetic excuse for an apology, she stopped right at the top of the nearest ridge, sp
un around, and faced him. Wind ruffled wisps of hair around her face and fanned her robe so that it clung to her body. She was tinier than he’d thought. Curvier at the hips, too. He wondered what else she was hiding beneath the weight of that cloak.
“You can’t follow me, though I can see you’re more stubborn than a mule, and will probably do it anyway,” she said, raising her voice so that it carried down to him. “It’s forbidden to pass here, punishable by death.”
“I hardly think—”
“If I tell you the way back to the city, will you promise never to think of this place, or me, ever again?”
Dante couldn’t explain it, but two seconds ago, all he’d wanted was to find a way back to San Francisco and ReVamp. To get out of this forest and back to civilization. Now, the thought of leaving this elder behind, not knowing anything about her, letting her vanish into the night felt . . . wrong.
“You’re not coming back to the city?” It was the only thing he could find to say, though he hated the concern lacing his voice.
She shook her head and clasped her tiny hands together in front of her. “I don’t belong there. Never did.” She looked content in this place. At peace. As if she’d run over the logs in this forest a thousand times.
How did her loathing of him dissipate so quickly? She’d easily lashed out at him with her tongue, been rude without regard. But now, her eyes were softer. Her words feather-light. Even the air around her seemed surreal. As if she was standing behind a veil of water, the waves rolling up and down her body. Was her maware some sort of protective shield? Is that why, now that she was protected, her demeanor changed?
Dante moved up the hill and watched her go rigid again.
“No,” she snapped, throwing up her hands. She glanced over her shoulder as if with one step backward, she’d tumble off the ridge, right into oblivion. “Don’t come any closer.”
The air around her wavered and rippled, as if his movements caused the disturbance in her aura. But he had to know what was going on. Had to understand the switch from pissed-off beauty queen back to the concerned angel he’d first laid eyes on.
Vamped Up Page 31
