“I hope it does.”
“How long has he been under?”
Vik checked his watch. “About ten mi—”
Raph’s eyes shot open and he gasped, deeply, for air, then began to pant and breathe heavily, as if he’d just been woken up from a nightmare. I stood up and went to him, kneeling in front of him and placing my hands on his chest. “Raph, are you okay? It’s me.”
He stared at me, but I thought he wasn’t really seeing me, until finally his eyes seemed to focus. He swallowed, then began to breathe normally. “Lilith,” he said. Looking up, “Vikram.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“I… don’t know. I was trying to find them and…”
“Take your time,” Vikram said, trying to lend some comfort.
“I couldn’t find them,” Raph said, “I tried to reach out, tried to call for Covell, but he couldn’t hear me. I don’t think he could hear me.”
“What does that mean?” I asked
“It means he could be hiding, or someone is hiding him, or he’s dead,” Vik put in. He shook his head. “I refuse to believe they’ve been killed.”
“I don’t think they’re dead,” Raph said, “I think I would have been able to feel our psychic link breaking, and I have not felt that.”
“So, then there’s still a chance of finding them alive,” I said. “That’s good, that gives us hope.”
Raph tried to stand, and I helped him up. “Maybe, but I do not know where they are, and I don’t think we will be able to find them using magic. If I cannot sense Covell, and he’s alive, it means someone is trying to keep me from reaching him.”
“And whoever is doing that will probably be able to keep me away, too,” Vik said.
“I’m sorry. I tried, I really did.”
I reached up to Raphael’s face, running my fingertips into his beard, and gently kissed his lips. His heart was beating so hard, I thought I could hear it as I got close. “Go and cool off, okay?” I said, “You’ve done enough.”
Raph took a deep breath, exhaled, and seemed to visibly calm down. I saw him turn his eyes up at Vik, then look at me again. “Okay,” he said, “But we have to go and find them.”
“I know… and we will. If Leo is likely to say no, then we won’t ask Leo—we’ll ask everyone. Everyone knows the mentors are missing, which means Leo is no longer the only one in charge. Not that he ever was.”
“Good,” Raph said, squeezing my shoulder as he walked past me and Vik. Both men nodded at each other, then Raph left, and Vik sat back down on his bed, running his fingers through his thick, black hair and sighing.
I walked over to him. “What is it?” I asked.
He looked up at me, eyes heavy with emotion—rage more than sadness. “I just feel… helpless. Frustrated. I want to do something right now. I don’t want to wait.”
“We don’t have a choice, Vik. We need to be clever about how we approach this, and you’re the smartest guy I know, so I need you to be at your best, and you aren’t. Not if you’re upset and angry.”
“I can’t help it, Lilith. Henry isn’t just my mentor, he’s a friend too. I can’t stand the thought that someone’s done something to him, or that he’s being held against his will somewhere.”
I chewed on my lower lip, approached, and took his face in my hands. Angling his chin up, I pressed my lip against his and kissed him lightly, taking in the scent of his cologne, of his skin. Slowly, my lips moved to his cheek, his neck. I reached under the line of his sweater and began tugging it off. Vik didn’t resist, but when I started undoing the buttons on his shirt, he took my hands in his and stared into my eyes.
“You don’t have to do this,” he said, though the mist emanating from his shoulders suggested he was hoping I would.
“I want to,” I whispered, kissing his lips again.
Vik released my hands, and I drew myself up, slipped out of my leather jacket, and pulled my t-shirt off. I then worked at the buttons on my jeans, and wiggled out of them, leaving me in my bra and underwear. Slowly, I undid the clip behind my bra, and when it popped, I let it slide off my shoulders and fall to the ground. I didn’t cover my breasts; instead I let him look at them, and when I saw the hesitation in his eyes, I took both of his hands and planted them on my breasts. Vik took the cue and cupped them, and then he gently started to caress them, allowing his fingers to brush up against my hard nipples.
I ran my fingers through his hair as he explored my curves with his hands. His thumbs hooked into my underwear and he began to tug. I allowed them to fall effortlessly to the floor. When I was completely naked, he pulled me close to him and kissed the skin just below my belly button. My head tilted back, and a soft sigh escaped my mouth as warm tingles began to race through me, causing my body to vibrate. Then he wrapped one hand around my waist and drew me to the bed eliciting a gasp as his strength took me by surprise.
Arching over me, he kissed me, and I sensed that same kindness I had sensed when we kissed on the plane again. He was a gentleman through and through, had nothing but respect for me in his heart, but I had roused something inside of him, and his energy was beginning to excite me.
He undid the buttons on his shirt and pulled it off while I worked at his belt buckle. My hands fumbled over the clasp, but it came loose, and his buttons, and then his jeans, followed. Vik kissed my neck, each instant of contact causing euphoric pulses to radiate through me. Then he arched his back up, allowing me to pull his shorts down and reach for and take hold of the hardness I had felt brush up against my leg. For an instant my brain didn’t register the size of what I had clasped in my hand, and then I looked between us, and paused, and drew a deep breath.
Vik stared at the gap between us, then looked into my eyes. “I’ll go slow,” he said, “I promise.”
I nodded, and he slid his body down and got into a kneeling position on the edge of the bed, taking hold of my thighs with his hands and delicately kissing my warm, wet center; much wetter now that I had seen just how well-endowed Vik was. It was easily the largest I had ever held. I was almost nervous. But when his tongue began to flick, and tease, and taunt, and my first orgasm began to build, the nerves melted away.
My thighs clenched around his head. I groaned as the climax overtook me, and when it was done, Vik crawled up beside me, turned me to my side, and pulled me toward him. He kissed the back of my neck, and as I arched my back to accept him, I felt the nerves come crashing back into me like the crest of a wave. He was slow to begin with, pushing deeper into me with each thrust, causing a string of moans and hitched breaths to leave my lips. I gripped a fistful of the bed cover and bit my lip to stifle any more pleasurable sounds from escaping, but then we found our rhythm, and the groans became soft, but constant.
Each thrust felt like it went deeper than any that had ever come before it, but I found myself exulting in the sensation of not only the sex itself, but also the way he would kiss and bite the back of my neck. When he reached for the space between my legs with his hand to ensure I would find a climax with him, I knew, he wasn’t just the biggest man I had ever been with, but also the most intense.
Vik gripped me tightly and thrust deeply when his climax erupted, and I moaned with him as mine happened at the same time, in a frenzy of tingles, and pulses of pleasure. We were both slick with sweat, and hot, and panting, but I felt entirely refreshed, as if I’d just slept for three days straight and woken up to the finest meal of my life. Vik pulled me close and kissed my shoulder.
“How was that?” he asked.
I turned my head and kissed him on the lips. “That… was incredible,” I said.
Vik smiled and kissed me again. “Shower?”
“Not a bad idea.”
I stood from the bed, giving him a view of my behind as I hurried toward the bathroom. Vik followed, and we entered the shower together. I hugged him tightly then, as if I thought he would float away if I didn’t press him tightly to me.
“We’re going to find him, Vik,” I said. “We
’re going to find both of them and bring them home, then we’re going to punish the people who did this. I promise.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
With Madeline’s permission, I called everyone to the school’s conference room a short while after lunch, when I thought the general tension between us would have had a chance to breathe and work itself out. Dante was the first to arrive, followed by Aiden, Liam, and the rest—including the Keeper, and Leo. The room was spacious enough for all of us to be able to sit down, and it overlooked the Alexandria’s courtyard, where birds would occasionally zip across in front of the frosty birch outside, chirping their songs as they went.
“Alright,” Leo said, looking at me. He was sitting on one end of the table, I was sitting opposite to him. “We’re all here. Now what?”
“How about you drop the attitude, first?” Dante said, without looking at Leo.
There went my belief that things had simmered down a little. “Guys,” I said, my voice rising above theirs. “Why don’t you both do me a favor and check your ego at the door? We have two missing people that need us to find them, and we aren’t going to do that if you two are constantly measuring each other’s dicks.”
Leo glared at me from where he sat, while Dante simply tilted his head, eyebrows arching, lips ever so slightly pulling into a smirk.
“Fine,” Leo said, “I assume since you called this meeting you have a plan, and since I was there when you found the business card, I’m going to assume your plan involves going to Pandora.”
“That’s right, but there’s more.”
“More?”
“Vik?” I looked at him, and he stood.
“Right, yes,” Vik said, clearing his throat, “I was able to review the notebooks you retrieved from Henry’s apartment and I found something disturbing in there.”
“What did you find?” Dante asked.
“Do you want the long answer, or the short one?”
“The short one, because it seems like we may be running out of time.”
“I actually think we have more time than we may be aware of, but I’ll give you the short one because I want to find Henry and Covell quickly.” He took a breath. “Someone, I don’t know who, or how, has found a way to take a portion of our supernatural energy and process it into a form of drug other supernaturals can get high from.”
The men in the room stared at each other, not truly believing what Vik was saying, but also unable to dismiss it. Vik just had a way of making everything sound convincing.
“It’s true,” Vik said, “All of the research Covell and Henry did talks about this drug. They had never gotten their hands on any in order to study it, so I can’t prove it definitely exists. But according to them, the reason they hadn’t been able to find any was because they weren’t looking in the right places. Then they figured out where to look.”
“Pandora,” Leo said. “That’s where Henry thought the drug was being dealt from.”
“That’s right. In his notes he said he was preparing to leave that very night. His plan was to try and find a vampire by the name of Sterling; a name that kept popping up during his research. He knew there was a strong possibility he wouldn’t be coming back, so he enchanted his notebooks and the business card, and left it there for us to see.”
“Do you think they’re alive?” Raph asked. I could see, and sense, the pain he was feeling. I wanted to soothe him, kiss it better, but I couldn’t. Not yet.
“I do,” Vik said.
“We have to believe that they are alive, no matter what, otherwise we won’t find them. We’ll give up too easily.”
“I’m not giving up,” Raph said, “I will do whatever I have to do to find my mentor.”
I nodded. “We all will; because Leo is right, my plan does involve going to Pandora and following in Henry and Covell’s footsteps—but it won’t be just me, or Leo. It’ll be all of us.”
“Everyone?” Leo asked, “That’s insane.”
“Why?”
“Because Pandora is an exclusive supernatural club. None of you have ever been seen here. The moment you show up, you’ll be subjected to all manner of checks. Do you really think they won’t know if the students of the mentors they’ve got locked up somewhere and Lilith Palmer, the only succubus known to live today, show up at the club in a gang?”
“You’re assuming the owners and operators of the club know what’s happening inside,” Dante said. “The employees working on the ground level in my father’s companies had no way of knowing about the embezzlement taking place by some of the senior executives. The bouncer won’t know a thing. No one will.”
“Isn’t that another assumption?” Leo asked.
“Yes, but it’s one I think we can count on. Getting in won’t be the hard part; figuring out who is dealing the drug, and where, will. That is if there is a drug at all. I don’t doubt Henry’s research, but what are the odds we’ll find it just by asking questions?”
“We aren’t looking for the drug, we’re looking for our missing people,” I said. “I think they went in there and asked questions, and for that they were kidnapped.”
“But there’s been no ransom note,” the Keeper said, “No demands, no one even knew they were missing until we tried to summon them. If you hadn’t been attacked at the mansion, we may not have known they were gone until they were scheduled to return.”
“That wasn’t for another month, at least,” Vik said.
“I also think they’ve been kidnapped and not killed,” Raph said.
“What makes you say that?” Leo asked.
“Because Covell and I share a psychic bond, and I have not felt it break.”
“Have you been able to sense anything from him at all?”
“No.”
“Then how do you know someone hasn’t just found a way to suppress his psychic ability?”
Raph looked at me, then back at Leo. “When I searched for him earlier, I couldn’t feel him through our psychic link, but I also couldn’t feel the link. You have to remember, this isn’t something that can be manipulated by someone else—it is a deeply personal connection we share. If he had been killed, I would have felt the pain, the hurt, as if it were happening to me. The shock may even killed have me, if it had been sudden enough. I cannot feel the connection, but I am still alive, which means he is too, and so is Henry.”
“Seems like good enough reason for us to go and find them, wouldn’t you say?” Liam said. “As a kid, back when I used to live in Ireland we had a saying; if you’re gonna go beat someone up, go in a gang, never alone. I don’t know about you, but if our people are being held against their will, we may have to go beat someone up.”
“I’m ready to do that,” Aiden said.
“Me too,” Raph put in.
Both men looked like they absolutely could bring the hurt on someone, but seeing them standing side by side, broad shouldered, jaws tightly clenched and ready to go, was doing all sorts of things to me; things which were entirely inappropriate for the context of the meeting we were trying to have.
“Alright,” I said, “So, here’s my plan. Tonight, when the club opens, we all go as a group. We get inside, blend in, and try and sniff out anyone who looks like they may be dealing this supernatural drug around. Nobody asks questions. Then once we’ve got a feel for the room, we can start using magic to try and root the vampire, Sterling, out.”
Leo scoffed, but said nothing.
“What is it?” I asked.
He looked at me and arched his eyebrows. “You really think you’re going to be able to just use magic in that club and not draw attention to yourselves?”
“I thought you said it was a supernatural club.”
“Yes, but one with rules—one of them being, no one uses their powers on anybody else. It keeps things from escalating.”
“Okay, so, what do you suggest, then?”
Leo sighed. “For the record, I hate this plan. I think it’s going to fail, and I think we’re going to get
our people killed, but none of you seem to be listening to my objections, so maybe you’ll listen to my advice.”
“Spoken like a true team player, Leo,” the Keeper said, slapping him on the back.
“Alright, so, the moment you use magic, you’ll be identified. Especially Vik. Mages are easier to spot than anyone else.”
“What about succubi?”
Leo shrugged. “Beats me. No one’s seen on in a hundred years, but that doesn’t mean you can fool whatever magic protection they have in place at the bar, so let’s make sure you keep your powers at a minimum too.”
“Okay, but if we can’t use magic, how are we supposed to pick the vampire out of the crowd?”
“You’ve never gone hunting for vampires before, have you?”
I shook my head.
“Of course not,” he said. “Vampires have specific tells that let people identify them from otherwise totally normal looking people. Number one, their skin is always cold. Number two, they don’t cast reflections on mirrors, number three, they tend to draw their fangs whenever they get rattled, or emotionally riled up, and number four, there’s going to be tons of them at this place—men and women.”
“How does that help us?” Vik asked.
“It doesn’t, I’m just highlighting how pointless this whole thing is.”
“Thank you, Leo, for being totally unhelpful. Anyway, I think I can probably ask around. Surely there are people who go to Pandora just be bitten by vampires. I could be one of those girls?”
Dante shook his head. “I feel like we’ve had the conversation of you being bait before, and the answer is still no. We have no idea what we’re getting into.”
“No, and we didn’t know back in Germany either, but I feel like whether you want me to be bait or not, I’m going to have a lot of eyes on me simply because of what I am, so why don’t we work with that as the basis of our plan?”
“You’re really asking us to use you as bait in the hopes that the right person will take an interest in you?”
I grinned. “Shouldn’t be a problem, considering I’m going to be protected by a private security force, don’t you think?”
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