by Marata Eros
He had the boner of his life. Her mate fought six vampires, all of whom were soldiers of the Faction, the most virulent of all vampires. With nothing to lose their mindset was always balls to the wall. It was the only way they fought.
Lucia looked down at Constantine and wondered if he would kill her while her head spun from the fall and she was vulnerable.
He did not.
Instead, his fangs burst from the flesh of his mouth and he sat up, jerking her against him and sank his fangs into her neck. She moaned as he tucked her against his body, his rigid dick cramming itself against her hip.
“Do not,” Lucia whispered as he violated her with his mouth.
He pushed a loose golden curl from her temple as he suckled at the humming pulse of blood like candy that pulsed in his mouth, clutching her tighter. With each pull, his strength returned and the roar of her blood on his tongue replenished him, closing the grievous wound in his belly.
Tarrin came upon his mate being raped for her blood and a black veil of rage descended. His body was covered by the gore of others, his entire being exhausted from the battle with the Faction. But a new core of strength rose within him.
Lucia needed him.
Now.
Con lifted his mouth from the Druid breeder who was also Exotic and her head lolled against his chest, her eyes droopy and partially glazed. Female vampires were at their most vulnerable after being fed upon.
Constantine placed a talon along side the twin holes he had just left on her supple neck. “Don't think it, Exotic, or I will kill her.”
“No, he won't,” Lucia said dreamily and Tarrin scowled, edging closer.
Constantine laughed. “Test me, Druid.” He placed his talon against Lucia's throat and a paper thin line of blood formed. Tarrin hissed, clenching his dark fists in impotent rage.
“I beg for an audience, no more.”
“You take what is not yours,” Tarrin said in a voice choked by his anger.
Constantine shook his head. “I was needy.” He swept his palm down the front of his body. Beaten and broken but moments before, the blood taken from Lucia was now knitting him together before Tarrin's eyes.
“You are a vile representative of a vampire,” Tarrin said.
Constantine thought about it for a heartbeat. “I know,” he replied.
Tarrin's eyes flicked to Lucia, her drugged stupor something she wouldn't shake for at least another half hour. She'd be no help in this. Tarrin heaved a disgusted sigh.
“What are your terms?”
Constantine met his ebony gaze, just the whites visible in the deepest part of the night. However, dawn was approaching. Con could feel its sure promise.
“Amnesty.”
Tarrin's brows dropped like a brick over his eyes. “From whom?”
Constantine asked for the moon, “Everyone.”
Tarrin threw back his head and laughed. His eyes found Con's again, taking in the fact that his mate's life lay in this sadistic male's hands.
“I killed Desmond, ally to the Druid and Reaper to spare his own sister the plan he had for her.”
Tarrin's face screwed into a frown of disbelief. He came closer and Constantine tsk-tsked him. “Come no further.”
Tarrin stopped. “What plan?”
“A mass breeding.”
Tarrin's shock bled through his reserve. Constantine let him mull it over and what it meant to him.
Finally, Tarrin asked the question that was the smartest, “And you took issue with this? You? How is that possible? You: the pillager of females...”
Constantine met that direct gaze and his answer was as good as the question had been, “I don't know.”
CHAPTER 2
Dawn trembled before them and Con's skin began to smolder, Lucia and Tarrin's following suit.
Lucia roused and shoved Con away, standing unsteadily.
“You have not killed him?” Lucia asked incredulously, gazing at Con.
Tarrin shook his head. “He tells a tale of a mass breeding for Ember,” but his glare told another story, his anger had a taste in the air.
Lucia swung her suspicious gaze back to Constantine, studying his face as he brushed off his leathers and tight fighting tunic. She began to smile, thinking his behavior was more smoke and mirrors than anything else.
“What?” he asked in a terse voice.
“You want her!” Lucia stated, quirking a brow, studying his usually vacant expression.
Constantine turned, keeping his front facing Tarrin. He'd received a stay of execution. But like a vicious dog that had been kicked one too many times, his dark gaze followed Tarrin with caution. Con knew that he could overpower Lucia, though he was not interested in that. Tarrin might be one he could not.
“Any male wishes to fuck a breeder. That is not so strange,” Con replied, a shrug in his voice.
Tarrin watched his mate circle Constantine like a shark and it was all he could do not to protect her, ask her to step away. Tarrin knew now that Con had been bluffing. He had almost no weakness, however, Con was soft to Lucia. Was it possible that no being, humanoid or vampire, had ever taken up for Constantine in all his existence? That the only one who had, Lucia, would be safe from his typical hatred for females... for all? Tarrin did not know, but he was watchful of Constantine. His very unpredictability made him dangerous.
Lucia did not care for Tarrin's over-protectiveness. It was just something that she had grown to tolerate. Something Tarrin could not help. He was far too Druid to curb the instinctual impulses of his heritage. She was female and Lucia was his mate. It was a biological directive.
“It is more and you know it,” Lucia said with sure knowledge.
Con hated that she could see through him that easily.
“Dawn comes,” Tarrin stated, the smoky haze lying over his skin a telltale sign of the sun's strike against him.
“Not Druid enough, Exotic?” Con asked.
Tarrin observed the smolder of Constantine's skin and replied, “As much as you.”
“No, more. You could not do to females what I have and claim Druid,” Con said in a bid to get his guts splattered. Given what had transpired between him and Lucia, he was almost suicidal with his commentary.
Constantine was suicidal in all things. He had nothing to lose, he lived for the moment, in the moment.
They stared at each other and Tarrin gave a slow nod. “True.”
He folded his arms across his big chest and as the sun split the deep midnight of the sky in a wash of tangerine colors, Lucia asked, “Where is she?”
“Hiding in a hole somewhere from the Big Bad Constantine,” Con answered with thinly laced sarcasm.
“You are a bad seed, Faction,” Tarrin said and Lucia gave him a look.
Con chuckled. “Your opinion of me matters not, Exotic.”
“It might matter a good deal more if I pluck your limbs from your body.”
“Gentlemen,” Lucia began, fixing her gaze on Constantine. “You will not drink from me without my permission,” she told Con.
“He will die if he touches you again,” Tarrin asserted as a dark promise.
Con grunted. “I was dying from a mortal wound, I was simply improvising.”
Tarrin was conspicuously silent at Con's justification and it troubled Lucia. Tarrin was a reactive and spontaneous warrior. His calm could mean many things.
“Let us shadow walk, dawn is here,” Tarrin said, breaking into her thoughts. Lucia took in the blood-like sunrise spreading and deepening the sky. They could not be caught in full daylight.
The trio made their way along the border of trees.
“What will happen to Ember?” Lucia asked as she moved beside Tarrin in a silent blur of stealth. Con thought about it: Ember had left his protection, however dubious. She might not understand what was happening between them, what the future held for her if she stayed with Constantine. Of one thing he was certain. He spoke of it as he blurred from tree to tree, the sparse cover of leaves granti
ng him reprieve from the sun as it began to warm the forest around them.
“She will need to return to the sea. Ember is Mer, they can only tolerate brief sojourns inland, then must return to The Mother.”
“What is 'the mother'?” Lucia asked, catching her breath against a trunk. She breathed out a deep sigh of gratitude upon seeing the stone entrance to their mainly underground coven.
Tarrin looked off into the distance, his head clearing the top of Lucia's. He kissed the crown of those loose curls, dampened by the dew of the morning. “The sea.”
Constantine nodded. “She is out there,” he began, his eyes searching the ambient darkness that was blooming toward daylight. He pressed his arms closer to his sides, deeper into the shadow. “Scared and running, she thinks I'm dead.” Or hopes so, he thought with a pang of doubt.
They moved toward the stone door, the edges cleverly tucked and camouflaged from casual observation and subsequent discovery. Tarrin tapped the opening where the latch lay hidden. He stepped aside to allow Lucia to precede him and then shut the door behind her.
“Tarrin!” she yelled, whirling at the sealed stone entrance separating her from her mate's sure retaliation against Constantine.
Tarrin pivoted smoothly and punched Constantine in the face. Con used his uncanny precognitive senses and turned his head at the last moment. The blow glanced off instead of striking him full in the face.
“You tried to rape my mate,” Tarrin growled as he swung again. The sunrise shone onto their nocturnal flesh, the skin heating in response. Their Druid blood was the only savior of their bodies as they fought. Vampires without Druid blood would even now burn like brightly lit vampiric torches.
“She was only a female,” Constantine huffed, his fist crashing into Tarrin's injured rib. It was a purposeful strike, Con automatically sought the harshest injury his fists could earn.
Tarrin grunted in acute agony when Constantine's knuckles bashed into his half-healed and tender ribs. The bastard fought like a mercenary: unpredictable, violent and unceasing. He smashed his knee into Constantine's nose and Con leapt back shaking his head to free his face of the blood that flowed like a small river.
“I will teach you a lesson this day... on how to treat females!” Tarrin roared and Constantine drove forward while Lucia's fists pounded the other side of the stone door to stop them, the material shuddering under her strength, but the door remained inexplicably jammed.
Con leapt on Tarrin like a stout ape, wrapping his legs around the other male's waist and bellowed into his face. “I do not need a lesson! That is all my life has ever been: a lesson of torture!” He butted his stout forehead into Tarrin's, ringing his bell.
Tarrin swayed, feeling Con's powerful thighs beginning to crush his ribs, tender organs suffocating from lack of blood flow, and room.
Constantine put his bashed nose an inch from Tarrin's own. “I shall die before I suffer another abuse,” Con said in a harsh bark of emotion, a volcano of unhealed mental wounds woven within the fabric of those words.
Tarrin heard it. He saw the conviction and agony in Constantine's face and as his body was screaming for release he responded, “Do not touch Lucia again.”
“Do not assume I will, Exotic,” Constantine said, jerking his body backward and falling from Tarrin in a graceful backward plunge.
Their chests heaved, their gazes locking in a silent challenge. A stalemate of a fight.
“Stop this!” Lucia said loudly through the other side of the door. “We must devise a plan to save the princess so that our allies will be satisfied with her return, not beat each other into pulps so we cannot. I have forgiven Constantine his transgressions. Let us... let us come to terms of a truce.”
Tarrin sighed, What concessions he made for his female. He would have avenged her. But as he looked at Constantine, his body scarred and hard, his wounds from the demons, then Faction and finally the ones Tarrin had inflicted closed as he watched and Tarrin saw what only Lucia had seen before: a male who may be of worth.
If only he had true camaraderie for anyone but himself.
Tarrin did not know if he could give it. This was a male Lucia had tortured in retaliation for his attempted abuse against her. Could Tarrin overcome that, even if she had already evened the score?
He would try.
For Lucia.
He stuck his dark hand out at Constantine and he looked at the symbolic gesture.
A human gesture.
After a full minute of deliberation, Constantine took it and the hard kiss of flesh held.
When Lucia finally got the stubborn door open she saw her mate eyeing Con with clear reservation and residual anger.
A trick of the light made her see what she wished for in Con's eyes: hope.
“Let us go underground,” Lucia advised into the stillness of the pregnant moment.
Constantine gazed around the outside, the weak light of almost winter piercing the ground in jagged shapes of white light.
“We can do nothing for her in full daylight, we will cook in the fire of the sun, Faction,” Tarrin said logically.
Constantine nodded. He knew this.
He swore he could almost feel the pull of her and glanced over his shoulder again.
That silken sex of wetness and mermaid heat called to the blood of the Mer that he held within the confines of his body.
The blood of the Druid to breed.
And that spot of Exotic lineage attempted to forge a psychic connection that he was not in the practice of employing.
He warily followed the Exotic advisors deep under the protection of the earth. Another hostile environment without ample blood, friendless with enemies and unknowns in every corner.
Con was coming home.
It was always the same wherever he went.
Home was no haven.
*
Ember backed away when Constantine was distracted. It was better that she go her own way. She did not know what would happen with that mixed-blood. Guilt stabbed her... he had saved her.
He'd also promised her violence while he fucked her.
Ember knew her brethren would be searching for her and she ran, the dawn creeping at the edges of a sky that shone like a black stone, gradually washing with colors of pink and orange, bleeding together like a canvas where water had spilt.
Ember did not wish to have her virginity torn out of her body like a plug of purity to be rid of. That is what the Mer warriors had planned for Ruby and her. Desmond had spear-headed the movement. He had been too much the coward to tell her what would happen. Two decades earlier, Kier, now King of the Vampire, had actually rescued her from the same fate. A fate her brother condoned if perpetrated by Mer warriors.
That had been a betrayal she could not look upon too closely. The introspection would shred her soul.
Ember was utterly confused. During the fight with the demons, the Mer Warriors had defended her. Yet... they would have easily ignored her distress once it came to the communal breed of her later. It made no sense. What had happened within the Mer society? What breakdown of civility had transpired that the few women they possessed should be bred like animals? Their rarity made them less precious... than what? Ember shivered in the forest, every tree looked the same. Her shoulders slumped and she shied away from what she must do.
There were no protectors, only manipulators. Males bent on the control of females. It was a sad reality that Ember did not know whom she could trust.
Ember had always been able to survive away from the sea longer than the other Mer. No one knew why. But even she grew weaker with the distance she kept from The Mother. If Ember closed her garnet eyes, she could feel the pull of the tide approaching and receding off that distant shore.
The cold sucked further at her energy and she was lost. If she went to the sea she could rejuvenate easily. She bit her lip, indecision eating at her already exhausted mind.
However, the Mer warriors might also be there. In fact, it was almost certain. Wit
hout the proximity of the sea they were limited. They would need to recharge themselves near the sea before chasing her again.
Ember could bed down if she could find someplace... she looked around, spotting a pile of leaves, forest debris and moss.
Ember thought of her pampered life within the womb of the Mer. How she missed her warm seawater sleeping chamber, her cleaning cubicle. She suddenly thought of her seed pods and put her hand to her hair. After searching deliberately through the entire mane she found each and every one, though they were hopelessly tangled. She sighed, tears burning the back of her eyelids.
She knew she'd made the right decision, but it was hard convincing herself as she lay down in her makeshift bed, her skin losing its last bit of heat. Ember closed her eyes, the blanket of leaves covering her, the luminescent color of her skin softly shining in the earth tones of the forest.
A lone jewel for criminals to stumble upon. And this part of the forest was a virtual highway for nefarious traders of illicit goods.
Ember was vulnerable. Not because she was female. But because she was far from the sea. The call she could cast to The Mother would not help her. The sea lay too far away.
When the men came upon her, a sleeping mermaid without a tail, they knew what she was immediately, and what decorated her hair.
Mason looked at the fragile creature of the sea, the sea they exploited for monetary gain. He nodded to the thug that was paid to do his bidding.
“Look, she's shivering,” he said. “Do yah think she's dying?”
Mason shook his head. “No, those people that live in the ocean are plenty adaptable enough to make do with temperature changes. It's that she's not close to the ocean. She's weak.”
“Let's just take the shit and get the fuck out of here,” Brutal said. His name was an apt moniker because of the atrocities he'd perpetuated in the name of the almighty dollar.
Mason cleared his throat. “No. We'd have to kill her to take the pods from her hair.”
