by Larissa Ione
“Don’t worry about us,” Eidolon said. “Just get where you’re going and we’ll talk later.” He disconnected, leaving Sin and Con in tense silence again.
For another long-ass hour. She spent the time gazing out the window at the passing cars, wishing she could be in one of them, behind the wheel and driving to a destiny of her choosing instead of being chauffeured to one she didn’t want by an arrogant dhampire.
An arrogant dhampire whose long, muscular legs flexed as he worked the gas and brake pedals. Whose thick biceps rolled and bunched as he steered. Broad shoulders filled the driver’s space, and images of her hands clinging to them as he pumped between her thighs filled her head. She was so acutely aware of him, so hypersensitive to his heat, his scent, even the sound of his breathing, that no matter how many times she averted her gaze back to the outside world, she found her eyes drifting back to him. Felt her body leaning toward him.
He was such a pain in the ass.
Finally, as the suburbs turned into pastures and farmland, Con pulled the ambulance off the main road and onto a gravel one lined by rows of trees.
“I’m guessing you don’t drive to work very often,” she mused.
“There’s a Harrowgate less than a quarter mile away in the woods, so no, I don’t drive often. A two-hour commute would be a killer.”
The ambulance crunched over gravel for maybe half a mile before Con pulled into the driveway of an old but well-kept ranch-style house set against a hill and cut deeply into a forest that appeared to have been cultivated for privacy. She got out and did a sweep of the perimeter while he moved his black GTO out of the garage to make room for the ambulance. He also had a motorcycle, a snowmobile, and an ATV. The guy liked his toys with engines.
Con eased the ambulance inside—the big rig barely fit, and she thought she heard the scrape of metal at some point. Shade was going to pop his cork at the scratches the vehicle had gotten today.
“Nice ride,” she said, as she trailed a finger along the GTO’s sleek fender. The thing still had dealer plates on it.
Con shrugged. “It’ll do until next year.”
“Next year?”
“I get a new one every spring.”
She peeked through the tinted glass at the leather interior. “Like the new-car smell, huh?”
“Nah,” he said, as he punched the garage door button. “I get tired of driving the same thing over and over.”
“Maybe you should get a plane,” she muttered, and he nodded as if she’d been serious.
“I’m working on it. I already have my pilot’s license.”
Of course he did.
Once the garage door had rolled down, he disarmed the security system and led her into the house, which was a true bachelor pad. The furniture was old but well-kept. There were clothes draped over the chairs and couch, and she wondered if the windows had ever been cleaned. It looked like Lore’s place, only newer. And bigger. Definitely more personal.
His shelves and walls were loaded with stuff that appeared to be ancient—pottery, framed sketches of stone cathedrals, weapons. She drifted toward one magnificent piece, a longbow hanging between a halberd and a Japanese katana.
“Impressive.” She trailed a finger over the smooth yew surface. “I wouldn’t have taken you for a house kind of person, though.”
“Where did you think I’d live?” he asked, amusement in his voice. “A tent?”
Shrugging, she turned back to him. “Most single guys are apartment dwellers. And most single wargs live a little more rustically.”
It was his turn to shrug. “Born wargs prefer the outdoors and wilderness, but a lot of turned wargs are human enough to like living with other humans.”
“Until they realize that humans are food and that chaining yourself up in an apartment gets noisy.”
“True.” He tossed the ambulance keys onto the dining room table.
“What about dhampires? You’re sort of born that way… and then turned.”
His hands went to his shirt buttons as he pinned her with a cool, remote gaze. Man, she wished she could read him better. “What’s your point?”
There was a strange avoidance vibe in his answer, but she couldn’t determine what, exactly, he was skirting. “Where do you fall on the warg scale? What do you do? About the full moon, I mean.”
He peeled out of his paramedic shirt, and her tongue nearly rolled out of her mouth at the sight of his sharply defined muscles and honed, hard flesh. She was used to males who kept themselves in top form—no assassin let himself go flabby—but Con had a lean, powerful runner’s body, the kind that was used well and often. He was made for marathons.
I spend hours on foreplay.
Oh, yeah. Marathons.
“I sure as hell don’t chain myself.” He tossed the shirt over the back of a chair. “I go home. To where I was born.”
She had to force her eyes away from his chest to meet his. “Where’s that?”
“Scotland. It’s where dhampires originated. The Dearghuls—the only clan that’s left—have a sanctuary there. Acres of property where we can hunt during the moon fever.”
Eyes level… eyes level… “How many of you are there?”
“Our numbers are pathetically few. So few that during the mating season, all unmated males and females must participate.”
Sin bit her cheek to keep from moaning at the “mating” word. “So you don’t mate like other wargs? I mean, getting a female pregnant during her heat doesn’t bind you to her forever?”
“No,” he said huskily, and she wondered if the subject had affected him the way it had her. “In fact, the males very rarely take permanent mates.”
His skin was so tan. “Why not?”
“Because we tend to kill the females.”
Ah, well, okay. That wasn’t cool.
She wandered around the living room and down the hall to check out the bedrooms. Yep, she was a Nosy Nellie, but Con didn’t seem to mind. “What do you do with all this space? You have parties and stuff?”
He looked up from checking the answering machine. “Nope. A lot of my friends are human. They’d ask too many questions.”
“Human? You’re tight with humans?”
“Not recently.” He moved to the window and yanked the curtains closed. “Just had to let go of my last group of buds. When they start mentioning how you never get older, it’s time to take a “permanent job” in some remote place with no communications. Right now, I’m studying nematodes in Antarctica.”
“Well, aren’t you a dork.” But seriously… how odd that he hung with humans. He seemed like an underworld-purist kind of guy.
His cell phone rang, and he dug it out of the lower side leg pocket of his BDU pants. “E. Yeah. You’re where?”
Con hung up, strode to the front door, and standing there, still in his scrubs, was Eidolon. Shade was next to him, clad from boot to neck in black leather, from his biker boots to his jacket, sunglasses hiding his dark eyes. He looked like the freaking Terminator.
“How’d you know where we were?” Sin asked.
“I’m a good guesser,” Eidolon said as he and Shade stepped inside. He tossed a duffel bag at Sin. “Clothes. Figured you might need them after getting nailed by the dart.”
Con closed the door, but not before scanning the area outside. “Is Runa doing better?”
“Not good enough.” Shade tucked his sunglasses into his pocket. “She made me leave. Said I was driving her crazy. Besides, I needed to do some grocery shopping.”
Sin nearly laughed at the image of the big, bad leather-clad demon pushing a grocery cart through the vegetable and diaper aisles at a supermarket. “I have a hard time believing you left her alone, not feeling well, with three babies.”
“I didn’t. Gem and Tay are with her.” Tayla, Eidolon’s mate, and her twin sister, Gem, were both half-Soulshredder demon—the worst of the worst—but they were gooey marshmallows when it came to caring for their nephews. Gem was pregnant, and Si
n figured it wouldn’t be long before Tayla hopped that crazy train, too.
Shade moved to Sin. “You okay? E said you were hit with a lock-dart.”
“I’ll live.” She dropped the bag and marched back to the kitchen, talking as she went. “Con patched me up before the assassins attacked.”
Both Shade and E focused on her, dark lasers of pissed-off-ness, and she knew she’d made a huge mistake by saying anything. “Assassins?” they both growled.
“Yeah.” Con took a six-pack of beer out of the fridge and tossed a bottle at each of them. Sin fumbled hers. She’d been too busy admiring his six-pack. “Your sister can’t take a freaking step without causing some sort of disaster.”
Shade popped the cap off his bottle and flung the top into the sink. “Who were they?”
“They were mine. I’m walking around with a bull’s-eye on my ass.” She held up her left hand and wiggled her fingers, where Detharu’s silver ring glinted in the light. “Any assassin who kills me and takes my ring inherits my job. I’m pretty much the underworld’s most wanted right now.”
“Hell’s bells,” Shade muttered. “What kind of defense do you have against them?”
She waggled her brows. “Besides my uber-incredible fighting and self-defense skills?”
“Yeah,” Shade said flatly, and sheesh, the guy had no sense of humor. “Besides those.”
I could bind myself to Lycus for the rest of my life. She shrugged. “All I can do is stay ahead of them. Most won’t be able to find me, but a few can sense me. It’s even possible that they’ve put out the word to every hired blade in the underworld. I need to keep moving.”
“You’ll have to do that to keep ahead of the Carceris, too,” Eidolon added.
“You’ll stay at the cave with Runa,” Shade announced, as if he’d made the decision and Sin would have to accept it. “The entrance is hidden, and even if they track you to it, they’ll never get in.”
“You don’t know my assassins. Trust me, they’ll find a way. I’m not putting your mate and children at risk.”
Eidolon raked his hand through his hair. “Then we’ll take turns with you.”
“Turns?”
“There are four of us,” Eidolon pointed out, as if she couldn’t count. “One of us will always be with you.”
“No way.” She twisted the cap off her beer bottle. “I can take care of myself. I don’t need you guys being all big brother. Besides,” she said jauntily, as she linked arms with Con, “I have this studly dhampire to keep me safe.”
Con went taut, his arm and chest muscles turning to iron against her. For a second she thought he’d argue, but he shocked her by saying, “I don’t have a choice. I need her blood to eliminate the virus inside me.”
“Well, gee, don’t sound so excited.”
“Trust me,” he said in a hard tone. “I’m not. I do have other obligations.”
Shade knocked back half his beer. “Con can stay. That’ll give you two bodyguards.”
Sin jerked away from Con, partly to round on Shade, but mostly because Con’s lack of a shirt was a distraction she didn’t need. “Do you not understand the word no? I don’t want to be responsible for you.”
“Responsible?” Shade choked on his beer. “Responsible for us?”
“Yeah. What if my assassins use you to get to me? Or what if they kill you?”
“I think,” Shade said quietly, “that you underestimate us.”
No, actually, she knew her brothers were more than capable of defending themselves. But no one was invincible. “There’s also the trouble with the Carceris,” she reminded them.
“We’re not worried about that,” Eidolon said, but Sin shook her head.
“I am. I said no.”
Shade was in her face so fast she didn’t have time to blink. Next to her, Con tensed again, and she wondered if, possibly, he was gearing up to defend her. “This isn’t up for debate,” he growled. “We have each others’ backs in this family, and we won’t let yours be exposed.”
She went up on her tiptoes, but she still only reached his shoulders. “I. Said. No. If I were a brother instead of a sister, you wouldn’t be this crazy about protecting me, and you know it. I will not be treated differently just because I don’t have a dick.”
“Sin—”
She cut off Eidolon by slamming her beer down on the counter, spraying foam everywhere. “I will not put you at risk.” She’d done that by accepting Lore’s help with her ex-master, Detharu, and it had cost her brother years of suffering. She wouldn’t do that to a sibling again, and neither would she allow herself to grow close to them. If she was stuck with them twenty-four-seven…
She shuddered. They were overbearing and protective enough as it was. If they got to know her, she’d be screwed.
“You don’t have to do this alone.” Shade’s fingers circled her wrist, his hold gentle but as unyielding as shackles. “You are ours—”
You are mine. The voice of her first master, the one who had taken her off the streets where she’d been starving, craving things she didn’t understand, pounded in her head. He’d run an underworld crime ring that mostly operated in the human world—gambling, prostitution, murder for hire, drug and slave trafficking. He’d been the first to own her, but he hadn’t been the last.
You are mine. You belong to me. You are ours. The words of past masters kept clanging around in her skull until her throat tightened and her heart kicked madly against her ribs.
“Yours?” Sin broke Shade’s hold and stumbled back so fast she bumped into Con. “I belong to no one.” God, she was trembling all over, and her breath had backed up in her lungs as anxiety swamped her.
“Whoa.” Shade’s hands came up. “Hey, it’s okay.”
Con rested his palms on her shoulders, his grip strangely comforting when it should have made her feel even more trapped. “I think you boys should back off.”
Eidolon and Shade glared at Con, glints of gold breaking the surfaces of their dark eyes as anger sparked. “I appreciate what you’ve done for her,” Eidolon said, his voice scraping gravel, “but she is our sister, and we can handle this.”
Tension pinged off Sin’s skin like buckshot. She opened her mouth to tell them all off, but Con spoke first.
“She needs you,” he said, in that soothing paramedic voice he’d used on her in the ambulance. “You know that. She knows that.” He squeezed her shoulder, a silent message to roll with what he was saying. “But it might be best if you let me stay by her side while you handle things from UG.”
Everyone stared, motionless, until Eidolon finally took a long swig of his beer and nodded. “You’ll check in every couple of hours.”
Sin clenched her fists at the command, but she resisted the urge to mouth off. Antagonizing E and Shade now would be stupid, and she wouldn’t put it past Eidolon to change his mind.
“I might only have a couple of days, maybe hours, before I have to take care of some clan business, but we’ll do what we can until then,” Con promised.
“Good.” Eidolon propped his hip against the kitchen’s island countertop and cursed with annoyance when the beer that had spilled out of her bottle soaked his pants. “Since you’ll be moving around a lot, can you take her to warg areas that might be infected? I can give you the locations of the packs where my patients came from.”
Con frowned. “Why?”
“Because before the Carceris interrupted us, we were working on reversing the disease in an infected warg. Sin failed, in part because too much of the virus was in the warg’s blood, and what was there had degraded too badly to be useful in the lab. If she can try the same thing with someone who has been infected for only a few hours, she might have a shot at success. I need a sample of freshly killed, intact virus.”
“Interesting.” Con slid her a glance, one that was almost approving, and for some reason, she felt like a happy puppy that had been praised for piddling outside instead of on the carpet. Annoying. “Yeah, we can do that.�
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“Lore plugged all the cases into a computer program the R-XR developed to track outbreaks and cross-check them with known populations of canine-based underworld beings—”
“I thought only turned wargs were affected,” Sin interrupted. “Why track anyone else?”
“Just a precaution, in case the disease mutates. Like it did with Con.” Eidolon handed Con a slip of paper, Lore’s handwriting scrawled on it. “That’s the log-in and password.”
Sin’s heart lurched in her chest. “How is Lore?”
Shade cocked a dark eyebrow. “Flipping out.”
She scrubbed a hand over her face. God, what she wouldn’t give for all of this to be over already. “I figured. Look, why don’t you guys go do whatever it is you do. Con and I will be fine.”
Both brothers shot her looks edged with doubt, and then nailed Con with eyes that said, If anything happens to her, you’re dead.
Con acknowledged their unspoken threat with a lazy nod that also conveyed that he wasn’t worried. But whether that was because he was confident in his abilities to keep her safe or if it was because he wasn’t afraid of her brothers, she didn’t know.
“Give me your hand.” Shade held out his to Sin. “Since Con is going to need to feed from you, I’m going to tweak your system to increase your blood production. After that, you’ll need to stay hydrated. Drink lots of water.”
Sin put her hand in his. Instantly, a warm, tingling sensation flowed from her fingertips to her bones. She sagged, and both Eidolon and Con moved to catch her. Con was faster, and as he pulled her into his big body, tension sparked in the room again.
God, these guys were impossible. Lore had never been this bad, but then, he’d walked on eggshells around her because he felt so guilty about what had happened that one night so long ago.
He also realized she had succubus needs, something the Long Lost Trio seemed to not understand. Well, it was time to make them understand.
She backed away from Shade, and in a deliberate, sensual motion, she reached up and gripped the back of Con’s neck. “Look, boys. You seem to think I’m some sheltered, sweet little virginal doll.” She scraped her nails across Con’s skin, and he hissed. Those fangs were so damned sexy. “But I’m not. I’m a Seminus demon. Think about what that means.”
