by Marie Hall
It’d been sick and twisted, but it hadn’t been the worst of it. The worst was knowing no matter how many girls they found there’d always be one item missing.
Their eyes.
The killer’s treasure. Or at least that was what the strike force thought.
Mila had known differently. Deep in her soul, her gut, she’d known why the eyes were missing.
She’d told no one else; only she and her kind knew the truth. Understood the significance of it. The bodies were incidental; the countless “Black Dahlias” hadn’t been the true crime. That was the mask, the cover-up for the truth.
The truth was the killer had been searching her out.
Somehow she’d gotten sloppy, done something to alert the shadow to her whereabouts. Because the monster was out and he was hunting for her. She was the last of her clan. She didn’t know the face or the name of the monster, but her ancestors had kept records of its misdeeds. The part it had played in the O’Fallen family history.
Mila was a seer. Meaning she could see the future. Meaning any creature to get their hands on her would seek to control her, to force her to use her powers to give them the upper hand within their subclave. If the vampires had taken her, and turned her as they’d attempted to do, she would have had no choice but to forever be their puppet. Forever pump them information to make them unbeatable. Knowing the future meant you could prevent and thwart any attack that came your way. In the wrong hands, Mila was a ticking time bomb.
People might believe or think that there were many future seers in the world; there were enough humans claiming to be the real deal. But it just wasn’t so; the talent lay in the blood. You had to be born with the genes to do it, and the genes were dying out. It was what made her kind so desirable. Though human, she was a rare breed indeed.
“How did you know what I am?” the reaper growled, and the sound of it didn’t scare her or make her want to cower.
In fact, it made her own animal come padding out of the deep recesses of her mind. “Did you creatures,” she spat, “honestly believe humans wouldn’t do our due diligence? Wouldn’t learn the strengths and weaknesses of those out of the closet?”
Silver eyes narrowed into thin slits. “You know nothing of my kind.”
She scoffed. “I know you belong to a class of filthy fae.”
Nostrils flaring, he gave no other outward indication that her slur had disturbed him. “And what would you know of the fae?”
Lips twitching, she tapped her nails on her biceps. “I know that it was your lot that started the bloody Great Wars. That you’re a covetous kind, petty and jealous. That a human life means nothing to you. You’re close-minded, selfish, and so damn vain you think the world should prostrate itself before ye.”
At the end her brogue came out. Anger always caused that. She was usually so good at hiding it, but just being in front of the smug bastard made her feel a level of violence she’d never felt before in her life. Hiding the thing was one of the few ways she had to successfully keep herself hidden while in plain sight.
Torn between her desire to rake her nails down his face or just slap the hell out of it, she curled her fingers inward instead and turned aside, only to stare into the slightly filmy eyes of her other captor.
“Lone wolf.” She curled her nose. “You are so rare. In fact, I know of only one.”
His irises flared.
Lifting a brow, she nodded. “Necrophilia is apparently perverse even to monsters. Who knew, right?” She tsked, and she knew she was acting like a bitch, but it was how she coped. Rather than give in to the fear and scream and cry, she became a shrew.
He shrugged, but she could tell she’d rattled him because his breathing had become suddenly erratic. “No, I suppose they don’t.” Scratching softly at the top of his wild mane of brown hair, he frowned, looking at her as if she were the strange one.
“What?” she snapped, at her wits’ end.
“How do you know so much about…us?” The red-haired faerie said the words as if he loathed the idea of grouping himself into the other category.
Standing here now, before her, the man was so much more than her dreams had made him seen. She’d never been into redheads, finding the shade of hair usually accompanied a pale shade of flesh and several hundred freckles to boot. But the faerie was unlike any redhead she’d ever seen. Instead of a bright orange mop, his was supple and falling to his shoulder blades. The shade looked more like a deep crimson rather than the shade of carrot she was accustomed to.
A hard, square jaw was clenched tight as his gaze roamed hot across her face and then dropped down the column of her throat before running across her suddenly too tight chest.
His lips quirked and she realized she’d been not just staring, but pretty much drooling. Humiliation crept hot fingers up her cheeks and, clearing her throat, she pinned him with her haughtiest glare.
“You should have let me die,” she hissed again, but this time not with any true anger. Her stomach was churning, her throat was burning, and she knew she was seconds away from bawling.
“You keep saying that. Trust me…” His deep, whiskey-roughened voice shivered across her body like the caress of a lover’s touch, pulling things down low and making her blood pressure rise. “If I’d had my way you’d be pushing up daisies.”
Shoulders twitching from holding herself so erect, she puffed out a breath and planted her hands on her hips.
“Now answer. My. Question.” His voice growled. Literally growled, echoing roughly through the cavernous room. A shot of heat pulsed through her blood. “Who are you? One last time to tell me the truth, human, before I decide you’re not worth my time.”
The shifter was silent as death, his filmy eyes drifting between the faerie and her. Damn that grim reaper, putting her in this position. If he’d only allowed her to die, none of this would be happening. To even contemplate breaking her oath, letting someone not of her own genus know who she really was, was blasphemous.
But the reality was she was no longer Homo sapiens. The redheaded bastard had let her become the thing she’d once helped to kill.
“I’m not mortal anymore, or have you forgotten?” Her upper lip curled. “Because of you I’m a vampire; because of you I’m no longer—”
“Well”—the monk held up a slightly gnarled finger—“that’s not entirely true.”
“What?” she and the grim reaper snapped at the same time—both turning on the now-cowering shifter.
Holding his hands up in a placating fashion, he curled his lips in an odd distortion of gums and teeth. A smile, maybe?
Pinching her brow, she shook her head. She didn’t care to hear anything they had to say; she should have died a while ago. Each second she lived, the more danger she was in. “Do you have a knife?”
The shifter frowned, clearly confused by her sudden change of subject. But not the reaper. Eyes widening, he stepped forward, clasping her forearms tight in his strong hands, and shook slightly. “Why? So you can stab it through your heart?”
She sucked in a sharp breath, and his smirk grew smug. “Think I don’t know you, human? Your intentions are written all over your face. So tell me, why do you want to off yourself so badly?” His hot gaze made her body burn, tingle, and it was suddenly hard to breathe.
Blunt fingers traced the curve of her jaw, up and around the shell of her ear, before tugging on a blond lock. Mila could hardly think when he did that, when he touched her that way, looked at her like he wanted to eat her all up, reminding her of the faerie tales of old. He was the big bad wolf and she was his prey.
Swallowing hard, she licked her lips. “I’m a vampire. I’ve been sired. They…they can’t know.”
She couldn’t believe it was her voice that sounded so breathy and sex-kittenish. It was so easy to believe the old stories about the fae now that she stood in front of one. How their beauty was as deadly as any blade, how a mortal (or immortal, as her case now was) could be beguiled and lost to the evil scheming o
f their cold, black hearts. How the faeries had turned brother against brother and sister against sister during the Great Wars, how they’d controlled and commanded armies of others to do their bidding, and all for one glance. One touch of their sexually charged flesh.
“Get off me.” Forcing every last bit of will she had into those words, she ripped herself out of his grasp, rubbing her arms up and down to erase the memory of his hands on hers. “Don’t ever touch me again.”
“You’re not sired.” The priest cleared his throat, head bobbing up and down. “I understand now. Why Lise sent her to me. You’re not sired.”
Lise. The mention of the Ancient One’s name sent a cold shiver down Mila’s spine. She was the one being her people had never been able to learn much on. Other than the fact that she ran a club for the safe intermingling of the others, and that she was known to sometimes run interference between them in order to keep the balance and tenuous peace amongst species, her people hadn’t been able to gather more intel on the woman. But Mila had always suspected that Lise was so much more than a moderator. It was why in Mila’s hour of terror, hers was the first name that’d popped into her head.
“What do you mean, Lise? What does she have to do with me? And what do you mean I’m not sired?”
Licking his front teeth, the reaper swung the squirrel back and forth, and immediately the hunger she’d been able to pretend did not exist while she was furious at him came back with a vengeance.
Her body ached. Her bones hurt, the blood running through her veins pumped like thick sludge, making her aware of the gnawing, throbbing, spreading toxin through her blood. Her brain. All she could think of now was that squirrel. Ripping into it, feeling its blood soak down her throat, quenching the terrible, fiery ache spreading hot and quick. Tongue feeling three times its normal size, she licked her lips, internally raging at herself that she didn’t drink blood. She would never drink blood.
“I offer a truce.” The reaper’s smile was laced with venom. “Food.” Tipping the squirrel out until its tail brushed against the tip of her nose, a wicked gleam danced in his silver eyes as he brought it back to himself.
Throat aching, she groaned, balling her fingers tight to her side. “Food for what?” She growled, unable to stand the constant pendulum swing of the rodent in his hands.
“Facts.” He shrugged. “Just answer some questions.”
She was no longer human, therefore the vows she’d taken no longer applied. But to reveal who she’d worked for, what they’d done, could put the others at risk. On the heels of that thought came another. She was now one of the monsters she’d hunted in her past life. The irony did not escape her.
Feeling a terrible urge to cry, she gritted her teeth and nodded. “Fine. But then you give me that knife. Do we have a deal?”
Chapter 5
Staring at her outstretched hand, Frenzy didn’t know whether to laugh or to smack it away. He couldn’t believe this petite thing was making demands of him.
But he’d make the deal, because she didn’t need to know he had no intentions of following through with it. Shaking her hand, he nodded. “Deal.”
A visible shudder raced through her. “Good.”
“Here.” He tossed her the squirrel, his lips twitching when she snatched it out of the air, but instead of ripping into it the way any newly turned monster should have, she stared at the carcass with a look of both disdain and desperate longing.
As her pink tongue slid along her still-blunt incisors, Frenzy wondered which hunger was most prevalent—the need for meat or for blood.
“Monk,” he boomed, causing George to jerk.
“What?” he stuttered.
“The lady obviously does not wish to appear crass in public. Set a chair and table and whatever utensils you have so that she can hang on to the last dregs of her humanity.”
Turning, George went to set up a table he probably rarely used himself.
“I’m fine.” Her anger beat at him.
Smirking, Frenzy lifted his brows. “Truly? That why you’re looking at the rodent like you want to rip its head off and tear into it, or toss it away like last week’s garbage?”
Nose curling, she held it out by the tip of its tail, as far away from her nose as possible. “I don’t want to eat.”
“You say that.” His gaze rolled across her white-knuckled grip. “And yet you’re holding on to it so tight I doubt I could yank it from your cold, dead—”
Screaming, she threw the body of the animal against the farthest rock wall. “You’re right, I am dead.”
Snorting, he took a step toward her. “What’s the matter, blondie? Afraid of the desires you feel now? Didn’t you know tangling with a vampire might wind you up in just this situation?”
“I didn’t tangle.”
“Oh yeah”—his upper lip curled—“that’s why I found you in a known crack house. What were you doing? Buying drugs?” He chuckled. “Don’t tell me you were out for a late-night stroll through the Tenderloin, because we both know that’s not the case. You don’t walk on that side of town without knowing exactly why you’re there.”
From the corner of his eye, Frenzy saw George bend over to retrieve the badly broken body of the squirrel.
“You smug, arrogant faerie!”
Laughing, he grabbed both her wrists as she began flailing them at his face, pinning them tight to her side. “Yes, I think that part’s been well established. How about you start telling us the truth? We’ve danced around this long enough. Why were you there?”
Her chest heaved up and down, whispering like a breath against his own, and though he didn’t want to be affected by her touch, her smell, his entire body flared to life. His nerves tingled and he realized that though she infuriated him and made the beast inside stir, he didn’t actually hate it.
In fact…
Her lips parted when he dragged a tendril of her luscious blond hair through his fingertips.
“Let me go,” she whispered, but there was heat behind her words, and though her lips said one thing, her body betrayed her as she leaned farther into him.
A horrible smell rolled through the room. Realizing what he was about, Frenzy took a step back, feeling more discombobulated than he knew he should, dropping his arms from her immediately.
Charred flesh and singed hairs stunk up the cave. He was already annoyed, and the scent only ratcheted up his emotions. Frenzy curled his nose, glaring at George, who was rotating the body of the squirrel—which was now stuck on a spit—through flame.
Gagging, Mila tipped her face down. As bad as the smell was for him, it was likely magnified a thousandfold to her now–highly sensitive olfactory senses.
“Tell me, woman, or I’ll toss you back to those vampires you suddenly seem so afraid of being sired to.” Idle threat, but she didn’t need to know it.
The way she looked at him made dormant emotions inside of him rise up from their long slumber. Emotions like humor, curiosity, and something darkly sensual.
“You know about me. About George.” He jerked his head toward the old shifter, who was still doing something that looked a lot like cooking. “About the Great Wars. You’re what? Twenty-four, twenty-five at best?”
“Thirty-two, you arse. I’m no child.”
Thirty-two, that surprised him. Taking another long look at her, he studied the firmness of her skin, the rich gold of her hair, and her rosebud lips. When mortals became vampires, they didn’t become suddenly modelesque beauties. However they looked in life, they’d now appear in death. That was why there was the occasional elder or child amongst the fangers’ ranks. His lips quirked.
“Interesting.” He grabbed her wrists, bringing her back to his side. He couldn’t seem to help but want to touch her.
Face scrunching, she tried to yank out of his grip. She was a new monster; her strength was nowhere near the level of his, and by the sudden widening of her eyes, she now realized it.
Rubbing his thumb along her smooth inner w
rist, he lowered his voice, easing his thigh between her legs. Not because he needed to do it to restrain her, but because he sensed that as much as she fought, she was not immune to him.
“Are we going to speak truth now? Or will I have to return you to your sire? I got a good look at him. Blue eyes, melted face, long-ass fangs.”
Her breathing hitched, and now instead of throbbing awareness, there was burning fear staring back at him from the depths of those exotically familiar amber eyes.
Releasing her wrist, he splayed his large hand against the base of her spine and pulled her farther into his body.
“You…you promised.”
“I promised you nothing, babe.”
“But…but you said, I tell you and you’ll give me a kn—”
His smile was full of teeth. “But you’ve given me nothing. All you do is sit and bristle like a ruffled porcupine. So tell me, what’s it going to be?”
Holding her so close, he felt the slight tremors coursing through her. Saw the way her big eyes held his look. She was terrified, but she wasn’t going to back down. Frenzy wondered if her panic was preventing her from really seeing the truth.
She was terrified of being sired to a vampire. But George had already told her she wasn’t. In her fury she’d obviously failed to register his words. But if she would just stop fighting a moment, she’d realize what was right in front of her.
Even her smell was different. Vampires smelled of traces of metal, of warm blood. Shifters smelled of warm earth, fallen leaves. Of the crisp scent of nature. She smelled of both. But maybe she wouldn’t know that, since a human’s sense of smell was pathetically limited, and though she’d obviously studied his kind, did the mortals know that each species carried their own scent? He doubted it.
