The Wild Rites Saga Omnibus 01 to 04

by Anna McIlwraith

  If Alan was offended, he didn’t look it. “Very well. Robert, fix us some coffee.” One corner of Alan’s mouth lifted. “I assume you still take cream and sugar.”

  Would it be immature to lie and say no? “Sure.” She glanced around, watched Robert start the machine, open the chrome door of the cupboard and pull out a pitcher of cream. Chill air misted out of the refrigerated unit and Emma wondered if the entire bank of cupboards was a refrigerated storage space. Made sense; the room screamed “evil lab,” and they’d need somewhere to stash the body parts.

  “Coffee machine in a place like this,” she said. “Very civilized. Y’know, like if Hitler’s bunker had Netflix.”

  Alan leaned back in his chair, propped his expensive shoes on the table. “Hitler’s bunker was a primitive bolthole. This is an advanced research facility with none of the trimmings your human scientists seem to find comforting.”

  “What, no ceilings, but you’ve got a coffee maker and a kitchen?”

  He tipped the chair back until it balanced on two legs. “Of course. A matter of priorities.”

  Robert approached the table, kept his distance from Emma, and set down two china cups full of dark, viscous coffee. The scent of it hit Emma and her saliva glands had a fit.

  “Yeah, well,” she managed to say, “Maybe you should reprioritize your kitchen staff. The menu leaves a lot to be desired.” The coffee, she suspected however, did not. Robert put a little jug of cream on the table, a couple of sachets of sugar, teaspoons.

  With a hand halfway toward his coffee cup, Alan stopped, frowned. A confused look lightened his eyes. “You have complaints about the food?” He blinked.

  Man, this was hilarious. If only she could share this with Fern: her vampire supervillain, affronted by accusations of shoddy meals provided to his kidnap victims.

  She clamped that thought down, focused on the blazing feel of her mental shields — still in place. “Hell yeah, I’ve got complaints about the food. Don’t you eat?” Emma had a sudden, vivid recollection: she and Alan at one of countless restaurants, plates empty on the table. She had seen him eat, she knew she had.

  He brought his cup to his face in both hands, eyes hooded, pausing with aromatic steam rising. “I do.” He took a sip, savored it. “My diet, however, is limited to meat and related things.”

  Related things. Emma suppressed a shudder. “You’re drinking coffee. And I’ve seen you drink wine.”

  Alan inclined his head. “My kind can metabolize almost anything, but whether we’re sustained by it is a different matter.”

  Emma moved around the table and leaned her hip against it, tore the tips of the sugar sachets and dumped the contents into her cup. “Damn those empty calories, huh?” She poured cream into her coffee, stirred. “Well mister low-carb, I guess that explains why you’re in such a bad mood.”

  His cup clinked against the table top. “You have not seen me in a bad mood, Emma, not yet.” The legs of his chair came down, scraped against the tiles underfoot. His eyes burned into hers and suddenly it was hard to breathe — she shouldn’t have come this close.

  “You were about to tell me what is wrong with the food here,” he said, but she knew it wasn’t what he’d wanted to say.

  She swallowed, coffee cup warming her hands, making the rest of her feel chilled in comparison. “Nobody serves peanut butter and jelly with chicken soup.” She took a sip of coffee, suppressed a groan of pleasure.

  Alan nodded, looking genuinely thoughtful. “Our chef perhaps needs a refresher on human cuisine. I’m sure he was merely trying to cater to your tastes, as wrongly as he may have perceived them.” His gaze darkened, and Emma suddenly wondered if she had just gotten some hapless vampire chef killed with her complaints. She felt nervous laughter bubble up, but then the expression fled Alan’s face and left it handsome and empty once more, and she didn’t feel like laughing. She felt like getting as far away from him as possible — but that would mean getting closer to the armed guards.

  She caught a flicker of movement in Alan’s body and moved before he did; she was back at her end of the table by the time he stood, slowly, a questioning look on his face.

  He raised his hands, as though they were any mere mortal man’s hands. “I do not wish you harm, Emma. That is not why I brought you here.”

  Her right hand throbbed, really waking up now, pain like the fever heat of a burn radiating up her arm. Like a burn, but meatier, less sting, more crunch. Being up on her feet was taking its toll.

  She wanted to say something caustic about the bullet wound in her hand, but pulled herself up. “Forgive me,” she said tightly. “I’m a little edgy. You can understand that, right?” She did let a little anger fill her eyes, a little fear; wouldn’t do to have him think she was trying to play him the way he was playing her. Couldn’t be too obvious about it.

  Maybe he suspected anyway. “I understand.” He tilted his chin, eyes very quiet. “You have not asked me again why you are here. Earlier, it was all you wanted to know, and now…” He cocked his head in the other direction, eyeing her with deceptive dispassion.

  Adrenalin pulsed through her body in a cool, shimmering wave, and there was nothing she could do to hide it, couldn’t pretend not to be interested now — Alan had to have noticed. A shapechanger would have noticed, could have heard her pulse quicken, smelled the sheen of sweat too thin for Emma to even feel herself. But Emma didn’t know jack shit about vampires. Until she did, though, she was treating them like shapechangers on steroids.

  “Sure I want to know,” she said. “I just don’t think you’ll tell me, that’s all. Kidnappers don’t generally explain the situation to their captives. Not like in the movies.” She let her eyes widen, swallowed audibly. “Generally, the captives just get killed.”

  Alan crossed his arms and paced away. “If I had wanted you dead, I had my chance at the roadhouse, when you stepped out into the line of fire.” He circled the table, circling her, and she turned to keep him in sight. He stopped. “No, dead is not how I want you.”

  Damn it. He’d subtly penned her in between the table and a chair. If she wanted to move away from him, it would involve a lot of awkward pushing and scraping. She gripped the table behind her with her left hand, bracing for a kick if she needed to fend him off.

  Wait, what the hell was she thinking? She was hardly about to dropkick a vampire. Well, she might, but it would probably be the last thing she ever did. With that leg, anyway.

  “You had me when we were dating, Alan. Why didn’t you take what you wanted then?” She hadn’t meant it to sound like a challenge. But it was done.

  His gaze dipped past her chin but came up short of giving her a full body once-over. He shrugged, silk sliding and pulling wetly over his pectorals and the heavy muscle of his shoulders. Why had she never noticed how built he was? He had always seemed lean, slim, mild — safe. She had been a fool.

  “I didn’t know what you were then. I had my suspicions, but did not believe they were well founded.” That shrug again. “If I had known…”

  “So.” Emma’s nails dug into the table. “The whole time we dated, I was just an accessory for you, something to make you seem more human, something like that, right? I’m only interesting now you know what I really am — which is another thing I’m a bit sketchy on, Alan, why the hell it’s of any concern to you. Last I heard, you’re a vampire. The prophecies relate to shapechangers. I hate to point out my own uselessness here, but what —”

  “I do not need accessories to appear more human, Emma, you should know that.” His voice cut through the air like wet steel, and he shimmered, all of him suddenly sharp and bright, and Emma’s mouth dried up. He took a step closer. “You thought I was human, remember?” His eyes narrowed, glinting like pale brown jewels. “It has been a long, long time since I bothered with such charades and even longer since I did anything I did not wish to do, since I touched anyone I did not desire.”

  He took another step and Emma couldn’t handle it
— she exploded out from between the table and the chair, sent the chair flying onto its back, knocked coffee onto the tabletop as she stumbled backwards. Dark creamed coffee splashed and ran across the table.

  If he touched her, she would lose it, she knew it. She backed away until she was at the end he’d started out at, the length of the table between them. He just stood there, looking less human than he had when he walked into the room, looking at her. With some expression in his eyes she couldn’t begin to describe.

  She desperately wanted to take the bandage off her throbbing hand, but didn’t. Couldn’t. “I don’t get it,” she said, shaking her head. “You didn’t go to all this effort just to get your ex girlfriend back.”

  Some of the shining, glittering something that made Alan look hyper-real and subtly wrong faded, as though dissipating through his skin. “You forget yourself, Emma, forget you do not know me. You were mine; I was angry enough at the slight to want to get you back.” Humanity filled his eyes, thoughtful and all too familiar — pride, jealousy, arrogance tightening the lines around his mouth. Then his lips curved in a half smile and the man disappeared, like a phantom flickering through his face, leaving only the foreign thing behind, the quiet thing Emma couldn’t believe she had ever thought was human.

  “But you are right, that is not why you are here now.” He moved, slow, hands clasped behind his back. He made it halfway around the table before Emma couldn’t stand it, had to move too, and they circled each other — or he stalked her. Whatever. So long as he didn’t touch her, she didn’t care who ran from whom.

  Finally she cracked, took the bait. “So why am I here now?”

  He stopped, unclasped his hands, leaned on the back of a chair and fixed her with a look that blazed with cold hunger. “Because you are velleheshli ka hirdam, the caller of the blood, Emma, and your power can change the world.”

  23

  Emma went still inside. “What did you just call me?”

  Alan blinked. “That is what you choose to focus on?” When she didn’t respond, he sniffed and shook his head. “I called you caller of the blood. Velleheshli ka hirdam , in the first tongue.”

  “What’s the first tongue?”

  Alan’s eyes flared with annoyance. “What is the purpose of these questions, Emma.”

  She flinched; she sure as hell wasn’t answering that question. She shouldn’t have said anything in the first place, but those words, she recognized them.

  That’s what Telly had called her once.

  Okay, focus. Keep Alan talking. So he was going to change the world?

  She almost wished he had kidnapped her out of jealousy or spite. Or even love. Not that she thought he had ever loved her, but anything would be better than the fire in Alan’s eyes right now.

  She suspected she wasn’t going to like the new version of the world Alan had in mind.

  “Let me guess,” she said, voice shaky. “World domination, wipe the human race from the face of the Earth, that kind of thing, right?”

  Abruptly he jerked the chair out and folded down into it, all that blazing inhuman power compressed. He folded his hands in his lap. “I do not wish to rule the world, nor wipe humans from the face of it. If I wanted that it would be done already.”

  Emma blinked, swallowed laughter. His face was still and utterly serious. Either he was one egotistical sonofabitch, or he was that powerful.

  Either way, she was in deep shit.

  She flicked a glance behind Alan, at the guards, at Vahan, Robert looking small and plain by his side. At least from this end of the table she had everyone in sight.

  “Who are you,” she said to Alan, “That you can make a claim like that with such a straight face?”

  He stared at her a long moment. “I am Alan,” he said finally. “I am a man you dated for a while. It would not soothe you to know more.”

  “Maybe not.” She licked her lips, trying to think past the white noise of panic between her ears, the souring feel of too much adrenalin turning her stomach. She probably didn’t want to know just how scary Alan really was — but others might. “Then again,” she said, taking a deep breath. “You’re not the man I dated. He doesn’t exist. Maybe I do need to know who you are.”

  Alan’s brows twitched. “Why should I tell you?”

  Emma swallowed. “Because you want me to trust you. You said it yourself, you’d rather I cooperate.”

  All the questions emptied out of Alan’s face. He leaned forward, elbows on knees. “You misunderstand. Trust and cooperation are not the same thing.”

  Her heart stuttered as his eyes flashed dark fire, but she pressed on. “You’re wrong. You’ve forgotten I’m human. You break me and I’m useless.” She shrugged. “Make me trust you, though, and you’ve got me. Humans are stupid like that.”

  True wonder dawned in Alan’s face, but it was a cold dawn. “Now that is a gamble, Emma. I can taste your fear, yet you are confident. You are a strange woman.” He steepled his fingers underneath his chin and dropped his head, looking for a moment as though he was praying. “Very well.” He looked up, slow smile curving his lips. “I do not remember the name I was born with; it, like almost all the rest of my human existence, faded from me long ago. What I do remember is this: in my seventeenth winter, I became stranded in a snowstorm at the foot of the Urals. Not far from here, actually. It was a brutal winter, the worst that my camp could remember. I had one of the season’s last healthy musk oxen strapped to my travois and nowhere to shelter. The oxen’s meat might have kept me alive for a while, but the smell of fresh blood in the snow attracted…things. Night fell. Hungry demons came for me, creatures my people had whispered about. They mauled me but left me wounded, preferring to eat the oxen first, before it froze, but one of them took pity on me for some reason. While the others ate, she tried to drag me to safety in an abandoned cave shelter. When the others finished feeding and came after us, she defended me, slaughtering them all.” Alan’s gaze turned inward, and Emma didn’t want to know where his memory had taken him, but suspected she didn’t have a choice. He was about to tell her.

  His eyes refocused on her. “They had left nothing of the oxen. I hadn’t eaten in days. So I ate the dead monsters. I drank their hot, fortifying blood. The female was horrified, knew what was going to happen to me, and she fled, though of course I didn’t understand why until much later.” He paused, breath sighing through his nose. “I thought I had wound fever, I was so hot , burning hot. But the fever kept me alive in the blizzard, and I made it back to camp. The next night, I came out of it and killed my entire tribe.” He licked his upper lip, eyes hooded. “I was so very, very hungry.”

  Emma waited for him to continue. When he didn’t, she cleared her throat, wondering if her voice would work. “What happened to you after that?” She cleared her throat again. “Where did you go?”

  Alan’s eyes widened slowly, as though he were coming back to her, to the room with its sterile white walls and the hum of civilization singing through the arteries of the vast building. “I grew strong. I slaughtered a swathe through Europe, into Turkey, Persia, Sumer. I spent two cycles of the moon in an Assyrian temple where the priestesses sacrificed hundreds of men for my pleasure and gave me the first name I can remember. Adamu, they called me. I let the priestesses live, because I was young and sentimental.” He shrugged. “Eventually I went to Greece, took the name Alan, for I wanted to pose as a man and Adamu was a demigod, a demon walking among mortals. The rest…there is too much to tell you the rest.”

  Damn straight there was. Emma tried to keep her breathing even and steady. Three months ago she wouldn’t have had the slightest idea what he was talking about, but since then she’d given herself a crash course on ancient mythology trying to figure out what the hell Telly was and where he came from, and her knowledge of prehistory was a lot better now.

  Voice low, she said, “You’re over four thousand years old.”

  Voice lower, he said, “Older than that.” Emma just stared at
him, trying to work up enough saliva to swallow. He frowned at her. “What, this shocks you?” He leaned forward, put his palms on the table and stood, weight on his arms. “You rub shoulders daily with creatures more ancient than myself, I am sure of it.”

  She backed away, bare feet scuffing the tiles. “I wouldn’t be so sure.” Not anymore. Telly was — had been — the oldest. But he was not like Alan, and Alan was not like anybody else who might be on their way to rescue her.

  She looked down at her bandaged hand, tears prickling like glass at the back of her throat. Would he come for her?

  She squeezed her eyes shut. She would not cry in front of Alan.

  A whisper of displaced air warned her; she opened her eyes and Alan was simply there right in front of her, looming, rippling silk and glinting blond hair and those crystal-pale eyes, and oh god, he smelled of fabric and subtle cologne and underneath, something deadly and musky and deep. A scent without a name but with a voice, and it whispered to the part of her that was born to run from danger — the part of her that was prey — and blew on the fire of her panic, teasing up sparks.

  She bolted and didn’t make it an inch. His hand locked around her left arm and she jerked to a stop, muscles and bones and tendons in her arm crunching together. He placed her in front of him once more without pretending it cost him and gazed down at her with a face she had thought she knew, all those months ago.

  “Why do you cry, Emma?” The words were gentle; his voice was not.

  She choked back a sob, turned it into a stifled scream. Her breath sawed, high and panicked. “I’m not crying.” Not yet. If he didn’t let her go, she’d do more than cry, she’d sob like a goddamn baby. Her arm started to burn, ligaments crackling and popping against once another. She flexed the fingers of her right hand, prepared to pass out from the pain, if she hit him with the mark she’d never survive but he was going to turn her arm to jelly if she didn’t do —