by Tracy Tappan
Shọn used the pressure of his jaw to open her mouth, then pushed his tongue inside. Hot. Soft. Deeply plundering. He tasted of power and darkness and wickedness—everything that Shọn was. It didn’t frighten her. Worse. It called to the predator in her, unleashing a savage hunger. Her gums gave a preemptive throb, the primal instinct to hunt and feed rising up to take command. Warning bells clattered in the head. If she bit Shọn, she’d be taking the first step toward bonding forever to a man she didn’t love. She tore her mouth away. “Shọn,” she panted. “Stop! I can’t handle this.” She fisted her hands into the front of his shirt and tried to shove him off.
He wouldn’t budge.
He was staring down at her with endless lust in his dangerous eyes, breathing heavily through his nose and mouth. His fangs were elongated.
She peered at his long, glinting canines, bloodlust and desire stirring a storm in her belly. “I want you to bite me,” she confessed raggedly. Licking her lips, she dropped her heated gaze to his pulsing carotid. “I want to bite you.”
Wrong thing to say.
Making a guttural sound in his throat, Shọn crushed his lips down on hers again, his mouth rough and demanding, his hot, plunging tongue blocking any further protest. She felt his hand fumble at her waist, and then his fingers were beneath her sweatshirt, touching her bare flesh, gliding upward… A breath shot past her nostrils, her loins beginning to congest dangerously. His hand moved relentlessly upward, across her belly, higher. No. She squirmed. No. His fingertips edged beneath the wire of her bra, caressing the rounded underside of her breast. A hard shudder rattled her spine. He shoved her bra up without unclasping it and grabbed her breast. She gave a throttled moan and jerked, pain throbbing through her pelvis. She still had her hands fisted in his shirt, and she twisted the material into harder knots, floundering between panic and wild animal need.
Shọn’s fingers found her nipple. A rumble quaked his chest. He pinched it—
The sound that came out of her was half-yell, half-ferocious growl. Heaving Shọn off her, she flew from the bed…but only managed two running steps before the pain in her obstructed privates took her legs out. “Oh!” She fell to the floor onto her hands and knees, her hair whiplashing into her face. “Heaven help me.” She gulped for air, peering up through the tangled spill of her hair at Shọn.
He teetered precariously on the edge of his bed, one arm hugging his midsection, his other hand cupping his privates. He wore a constipation-face of pain that would’ve been comical had the situation not been so appallingly disastrous—or nearly disastrous.
She jolted to her feet and staggered for the door.
He surprised her by leaping off the bed and capturing her wrist. “Wait.”
“No!” A veil of tears clouded her vision.
“It doesn’t have to be like this between us, Luvera.” The corners of his eyes were still tight with pain. “We can be together without it hurting.”
She pulled against his hold. “Let go of me, Shọn.”
He tightened his grip. “Just listen to me. There’s something—”
“No!”
“—the Stânga Town kids have been talking about something called a Blood Ride.”
She froze. A what?
“Here’s how it goes,” he said. “We cut ourselves and then lick each other’s blood, and that temporarily opens up our…you know, our blockage.”
She stared at him, mouth agape, shock rooting her feet to the floor. A Blood Ride?
“We could do stuff together, maybe even have sex, without bonding. You could be with me, but not ruin yourself for a future Dragon male. It’s perfect.”
She finally located her voice. “Are you crazy? We could never manage something like that. Our bloodlust would get too strong and we’d end up biting each other.” She pried at the fingers he had wrapped around her wrist. “I barely made it through that kiss, for heaven’s sake.”
“We could handle it.” He finally released her. “We’d just have to—”
“Get real, Shọn! I’m a Pure-bred and you’re a Half-Rău. No. Way.” She rushed for the door, but he beat her there and planted his hand on it to stop her from leaving.
“C’mon, Luvera…”
She gave him an icy stare. “Are you too much of an Om Rău to remember that blood is sacred to Vârcolac? The drawing of it is an act of claiming in and of itself, Shọn. A Blood Ride would absolutely ruin me for any other mate. You, too, for that matter. Your idea is so far from perfect, I can’t even say what it is.”
A muscle jumped in his cheek. “No one would know if you just didn’t tell. We wouldn’t be bonded, so—”
“For the hundredth time, I said, no!” She slapped his arm aside and wedged out of his door, running down the grand staircase and out of the mansion as fast as she could. She hastened up Main Street toward Garwald’s, even though the last thing she wanted to do was return to her shift. She felt wrong everywhere inside, her stomach hollow, her heart a weighted lump. But not going back would raise too many questions. She ran the rest of the way.
Two hours later, she trudged home to her mother’s house and found her way tiredly into her own bedroom. She was going to take a long bath and forget about—
She stopped in a sudden movement.
There on her desk were three neatly stacked medical books.
All of the blood vacated her head, and tears leapt to her eyes so fast, they were spilling down her cheeks before she could even make the attempt to check them. Pressing a hand over her mouth, she tried to stifle her cries. Well, yes, and why not?
She had earned them, after all.
Chapter Twenty
Topside, 4:21 a.m.
Dev woke to the steady soft bleep-bleep-bleep of a heart monitor and the low didgeridoo of other hospital machinery. Physical sensations entered his consciousness next, the pinch of an IV needle at his wrist, a firm mattress’s over-starched sheets nice and crisp beneath his ass. He registered only a slight ache on his back—Tëer slamming him into a wall—and along his shoulder—an incompetent cop shooting him multiple times. The majority of the pain was being dulled by whatever drugs were coming in through the IV and making his head trip the light fantastic. His mouth was dry as the bottom of a combat boot. Jesus, he needed to feed. Where the hell was his donor…?
A soda can pop-fizzed open. “So how’re you feeling, sport?”
Dev stopped breathing, his heartbeat slowing to a near halt, survival instinct shifting him down into hyper-stillness. He wasn’t…in Ţărână’s hospital.
“I can tell you’re awake,” the man’s voice came again, the tone of it starting to sound familiar. “Your heart rate changed.”
Dev pried open both eyes, then immediately squinted. The fluorescent lights were like one-zillion-watt tractor beams being shot directly into his retinas. How much blood had he lost, exactly? He needed to feed bad. He blinked several times, focusing on the man standing at the foot of the bed: neatly trimmed brown hair, a lean, athletic body, and a pair of uniquely colored blue-green eyes. The right sleeve of the guy’s shirt was bulkier than the other, suggesting that his arm was wrapped in a bandage. Great. This was the dipshit from Kendra’s house.
Dev coughed the scratchiness from his throat. “They just letting gun-toting schmucks waltz into hospitals these days?”
The man smiled, the expression cutting lines into the sides of his mouth that probably made most women squirm in their panties. “I’m Detective John Waterson of the SDPD.” He took a sip of his Coke. “Sorry about shooting you, but…” He shrugged, looking pretty damned unrepentant. “You were caught in the commission of a crime.”
Waterson. Hell, Dev knew the name. This is the choad Jaċken had put down for the count at Scripps Hospital; an understandable move on Jaċken’s part, seeing as this particular cop had a serious hard-on for Tonĩ and was making a habit of sticking his nose into Om Rău and Vârcolac business, where it definitely didn’t belong.
“I wasn’t committing
a crime,” Dev returned blithely. “I was trying to prevent one. Something you would’ve detected, Detective, if you hadn’t been in the middle of an all-out shoot-’em-up panic.”
Waterson’s smile tightened at the corners, his expression chilling. “I also shot one of the men who abducted Miss Mawbry. Tell me.” He set a file on the hospital tray attached to Dev’s bed. “Why would that man bleed acid?”
Dev arched his brows high, then snorted, pretending to think the idea was absurd. “Have you been hitting the crack pipe from the police evidence locker, man? Nobody bleeds acid.” Except for Topside Om Rău assholes who wear enchanted immortality rings.
Waterson set down his Coke and pulled a small, spiral notebook out of his breast pocket. He flipped it open and read from it, quoting Dev’s own words back to him. “‘You have no idea what kind of rathole they’re taking her to.’” Setting the notebook on the tray next to the file, he met Dev’s eyes. “You know who those men are, champ, and I’d like you to enlighten me.”
Dev dragged his tongue across his cracked lips. What he wouldn’t give to go back to being unconscious and escape this conversation…escape, also, a blood-need that was rapidly shrinking his stomach down to the size of an over-wrinkled raisin.
“Miss Mawbry also called out ‘help me,’” Waterson continued, “when you made your entrance into her living room. At first I thought she was yelling that at me because of you, but now I realize that she was yelling that at you.” He paused, like he was adding extra drama to the little interrogation scenario he had going here. “Because she knew you.” Waterson picked up his Coke and took another slow sip. “Would that be because your security team saved her the other night, chief?”
Dev gave Waterson a droll look. “Well, I guess that’s something you’ll never find out for sure, will you, zippy”—he sneered—“seeing as you let her get taken.”
Anger sparked blue-green lights in Waterson’s eyes. “Why don’t you tell me about the top secret research institute you work for, Mr. Nichita.”
Dev hooded his lids. “’Fraid I don’t know what you’re talking about. I was just a concerned citizen who happened to be passing by.”
“One who carries a military-issue M4?” Waterson made a sound in his throat. “I’m not drinking that Kool-Aid, pal.”
“Suit yourself.” Dev shrugged, then winced in pain. Sweat was running down the sides of his face. He was feeling like serious hell now, the gathering cobwebs in his head making it more and more difficult to track this cat-and-mouse game the cop seemed intent on playing.
Waterson flipped a page in his notebook and read again. “On Wednesday, January 20th, a Dr. Antoĩnetta Parthen went missing from her hospital room at Scripps Memorial Hospital after suffering a concussion in a car crash. Evidence suggests that a crime had been committed in her room just prior to her disappearance; there was a hole in the wall, some acid damage”—he paused to glance up and repeat “acid” with emphasis. “And a pool of blood left behind that was neither Dr. Parthen’s nor a Nurse Hollowitz’s, who was injured at the scene.”
A vein in Dev’s forehead pounded. No, it’d been Vinz’s blood. The warrior had taken a Bătaie Blade to his chest during a confrontation with Topside Om Rău fuck-nuts, Mürk and Rën.
“This blood tested as having a strange element in it, one not entirely human.” Waterson exhaled forcefully. “Not human? Wow, what do you make of that?”
Dev just stared, the muscles in his neck straining as he tried to swallow. The inside of his mouth had gone from combat boot to Death Valley a while back. If he got sick enough, he supposed the hospital would try pumping him full of blood, but that wouldn’t do him a damn bit of good. A Vârcolac needed to ingest his blood in a cocktail with his own Fiinţă, but he couldn’t exactly tell the hospital staff that, so…he was headed full speed for a hurt locker. All the more reason to get the hell out of this humanoid St. Elsewhere. Trouble was, he wasn’t sure if he could manage it on his own locomotion, and if the hospital staff got bunched and tried to stop him, not to mention Waterson, there was every chance they’d succeed. So whatever behind-the-scenes plans his men were devising—because it was impossible that they’d just left him—they’d better be working it in overdrive.
“Nothing to say? Hmm, interesting. Because, you see,” with the edge of his thumb, Waterson opened the file on Dev’s hospital tray and peered down at the top page, “according to these tests the hospital just ran on you,” he looked up and locked eyes with Dev, “your blood has this same strange element.”
Dev’s heart monitor jumped an erratic bleep. He gritted his teeth around a silent curse.
Waterson glanced at the monitor and straightened, a shit-eating smile on his face. “Blood, blood, blood. What is it about this case and blood?” He crossed his arms and smoothed a hand over his jaw. “Your doctors think you have leukemia, you know. It seems your white count is extremely high and your red blood cells oddly low. Oops, I wasn’t supposed to tell you that, but we both know it’s not true. Why don’t you tell me who you are, what you are? The name Devid Nichita doesn’t show up in any of our databases.”
Dev unglued his tongue from the roof of his mouth. “Did you flunk detective school, Waterson? ’Cause it just seems to me that a smart cop might figure there’s a good reason for that.”
“I’m exceptionally good at keeping secrets, so please…” Waterson gestured Dev onward, his smile growing really fucking punch-worthy. Waterson tapped an index finger on Dev’s tray, waiting, then, “Hey, you ever see the movie Splash? Remember when the girl was found out as a mermaid, how the scientists stuck her in a tank and did all kinds of experiments on her?” One of Waterson’s eyebrows hitched. “How’d you feel about going through a little something like that?”
Dev’s belly rolled over on a wave of nausea, his throat pinching down to a thin cable. This tool of a detective had just pegged his worst fear, just about any Vârcolac’s, in fact. Some people had nightmares about being buried alive or were afraid to fly. Dev’s phobia was about being systematically dissected into a million pieces as some egghead researcher tried to figure out what made a vampire tick. “Are you saying you think I’m a merman?” Unfortunately, his attempt at a wry tone came out as a dried-up croak.
“I think you’re something. And I believe I’m in a position to use whatever means necessary to find out.” Waterson glanced pointedly at Dev’s left wrist.
Dev followed the direction of the detective’s look, and saw that the wrist without the IV was handcuffed to the hospital bedrail. No big deal to a fully-functioning Vârcolac. Handcuffs could be snapped like string—although the need to hide that power might prove problematic—but Dev was rapidly losing the ability even to walk out of this hospital, much less perform phenomenal feats of strength. Which meant—
Waterson had him trapped.
Remember how the scientists stuck that mermaid in a tank and did all kinds of experiments on her…? Panic shot through Dev’s stomach and bowels, the beep-beep-beeping of his heart monitor jacking into a riotous rate as adrenaline flooded his body.
Waterson’s eyebrows flew up. “Well, well,” he drawled in a satisfied tone. “That thought bothers you a great deal, I see. Why would it? Unless, of course, you have something to hide?”
“Go fuck yourself,” Dev gnashed through his teeth. Done with being on display, he seized a fistful of the wires attached to his chest and ripped off the little round pads, sputtering the heart monitor into flatline. As a little alarm eeeeeped, he went for his IV next—he couldn’t damn well think his way through this mess on drugs—biting into the needle and jerking it out. Blood squirted from his wrist.
“Hey—!” Waterson leapt at him.
Like the cornered animal he was, Dev lashed out, catching the detective on the side of the face with a brutal backhand. Blood from Dev’s wrist splattered the detective’s cheek, and the adrenaline-backed force of the blow whipped Waterson’s head to the side and sent him spinning into the IV stand.
; “Touch me and I’ll kill you.” Dev’s voice was a dangerous growl of warning, hardly recognizable.
Waterson stumbled out of the tangle of IV hoses with murder in his eyes, breath sawing in and out of his nose. The imprint of Dev’s hand stood out bright red against the white anger of the detective’s complexion.
“Heavens to Betsy!” a nurse gasped as she charged into the room. “What’s going on?”
“Police business!” Waterson snarled at her, snatching up Dev by the hospital gown and hauling him to within an inch of his face, cold fury flashing in the depths of his blue-green eyes. “Stop lying to me, you fucking piece of shit, you hear me. I’m sick and goddamned tired of it!”
“Oh, dear.” The nurse turned and scuttled back out.
Dev pressed his lips closed. Between the smell of his own blood and the cop’s aggression, his fangs were ripping down from his gums. Unfortunately, Waterson interpreted the gesture as further obstinacy.
He gave Dev a hard shake, jarring his shoulder. “I want the truth!”
Dev sucked in an abrasive breath as blinding spears of pain electrified the room around him. He wrapped one hand around the cop’s wrist, the other hand rattling ineffectually at the bedrail, and tried to pry the man’s hold loose. His hospital gown ripped. The dickhead wouldn’t let go.
“You have been told the truth,” Dev said through tight, fang-concealing lips, “the last night you saw Dr. Tonĩ Parthen at Scripps Hospital.” His hand started to shake, and he let go of Waterson’s wrist before he gave away that he’d expended his last reserves. “You just don’t want to believe it, you weak tit, because if you did, you’d have to accept that Tonĩ would rather willingly work at a research institute than go off and have babies with you. Oh, ho! Now see who’s bothered a great deal.”
