by Jill Myles
He shrugged. “It burns me with cold if I disobey the queen’s orders.”
I released him, stepping back. I felt numb. “And what are her orders?”
“Not to touch you. Not to drink from you.” He pulled out the pack of cigarettes again and tapped the end repeatedly, not looking at me. “I kiss you, it burns me. I make love to you, it’ll eat a hole through my throat. That covers the big stuff.”
Great. We were finally together again, and he was going to burn alive if he so much as tried to touch me. “So what do we do?”
His eyes flicked red. “We continue doing what we do, Princess. And if I want to kiss you, she’s not going to stop me.”
I licked my lips, trying to think. “You need blood. Tonight. Caleb said we had to be ready to go in an hour.”
He shook his head. “I’m not drinking from another woman with you here. I’m not doing that to you again.”
Sweet, but misguided. If he put his lips on another woman, she’d be a quivering, orgasmic mess at his feet before a minute had passed. I didn’t like the thought of that much, but what could we do?
I knew that he enjoyed it. He might not want to, but just like me, he couldn’t control his urges.
“I don’t want to see you drinking from another woman,” I said softly. “It hurts me.”
He pulled me close and touched his forehead to mine, our eyes locking. “I don’t want anyone else but you, Jackie. You know that. I don’t care if this thing burns me.”
I cared. I fingered his shirt collar, thinking hard as I stared at the offending black band. “I can’t stand the thought of you hurting yourself just to touch me, Zane.”
He pulled me close, his hands sliding to my waist, then lower. The collar seemed to flare even colder, but he ignored it, giving me a devilish smile. “Jackie, Princess. She knows she can’t stop me from touching you. That’s why she slapped this collar on me—to remind me that she’s the boss. That I’m in trouble for disobeying her rules.”
I swallowed the knot in my throat. I wanted to lay my head on his shoulder, but that would put my forehead right against the collar, and I didn’t want to go near it. “And what if she does worse than a collar if she finds out that it’s not doing any good? What if she does something worse to you?”
He lost his wings once. He can lose them again …
His mouth curved up slightly and he reached out and brushed my cheek with his fingers. “Jackie, not being with you is the worst that she can do to me. If we’re not together, what does it matter if I live for four days or four thousand years more?” His thumb brushed across my lip, his gaze going there. “There is nothing for me if you’re not in my life.”
I shook my head at him. The words were beautiful, but they were all wrong. I didn’t want to hear him talking of death—it hurt too much. “Zane, don’t.” I patted his chest. “Let’s not think about immortality or things like that.” Or wedding rings or Noah stuck in Mexico, sacrificing himself for me. Because then I’d break down into a sobbing mess. “Let’s just worry about that collar right now. And how to get you fed.”
“I already told you, not from another woman. Not with you so close to me.” His red eyes burned into mine.
No, that wouldn’t work. We’d need some sort of donor that wouldn’t get too attached … Wait.
My fingers curled in his jacket and I looked up into Zane’s weary red eyes. “What about a guy?”
His brow furrowed for a moment. “I didn’t take you for the type to watch a couple of guys get off, Princess—”
“Not like that,” I said, my mind buzzing. “If your mouth touches them, you make them come, right? What if you don’t touch them?”
He frowned at me. “Blood doesn’t come out of a spout.”
“No,” I said brightly. “But it does come out of a wrist.”
His mouth curled in a heartbreaking smile. “You mean to tell me that you’re going to find some guy to cut his wrist open to feed me? This age is full of stupid humans, Jackie, but I think you’ll be hard-pressed to find a volunteer for that.”
“I know just the guy,” I said. “And since it’s the right thing to do, he’ll love it.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Ethan didn’t love it. He actually looked rather disgusted with the concept, but at my pleading and Zane’s silence, he gave a stiff nod and reached for one of the knives from the food service tray and slashed his wrist.
Blood sprayed everywhere. “Holy shit,” I said, wiping a few drops off my face. “A little warning next time.”
Zane’s hand, held tightly in mine, clenched. He leaned down and licked a drop of blood off of the back of my hand in a sensual move that set my pulse pounding.
“We only have a few minutes before my healing closes the wound,” Ethan said, and gestured at the nearby chair. “Sit and I will pour.”
Zane sat, his head tilted back, and I watched as Ethan held his cut wrist a few inches from Zane’s mouth.
It was the weirdest thing I’d ever seen. Even weirder, Ethan’s eyes kept flicking that strange color with every minute that passed. Whatever brownie points he got off on, he was definitely racking them up at the moment.
Zane held my hand as he fed, his eyes on me. As the blood poured into his open mouth, the awful red receded from his eyes. Soon the steady flow of blood from Ethan’s wrist turned into a trickle, and Zane raised a hand to indicate that he was finished as well. He nodded his thanks to Ethan.
He sat up and lit a cigarette. “Well, that was weird. My lover watching while another man feeds me. Not in my usual repertoire.” He gave me another half-curled smile.
“Whatever gets us through the night, right?” I squeezed his hand.
The club was deserted.
I got out of the car and stared at the front of the club, wary. When I’d seen the sleek neon sign and the full parking lot six months ago, I had walked into a mess of problems. I’d met the vampires, pissed off their queen, nearly sacrificed Remy’s life, and put my own at risk to boot.
I guess some things never changed.
The club looked the same as it had six months ago, the neon sign with the blue crescent moon and the rippling letters midnight was still on. Beer and liquor signs lit up the windows, and the decorative blue and purple lights that wrapped around the edge of the building twinkled in the crisp night. The building was low-key and charming, like a friendly neighborhood dive. Except beneath the scribbled-on-walls, beat-up dance floor, and smoky atmosphere lurked a very different bar in the basement.
A very popular vampire hangout.
“This place looks disreputable,” said Ethan, his voice full of disapproval. “Perhaps your succubus friend will not come here.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Zane said, grinning as he slid out of the driver’s seat. He tossed his cigarette butt down onto the empty parking lot. “If I were a rampaging evil spirit, the first place I’d head is somewhere I could get a drink.”
Caleb just shrugged his coat tighter over his compact shoulders. “Home, sweet home.” He’d changed into a long, sweeping gray duster and a collared white shirt that hid the golden torque encircling his neck that was so crucial to our plans.
Zane didn’t seem inclined to hide his badge of shame. It stood out starkly against the paleness of his skin.
Vampires were odd creatures. Far be it from me to try and figure them out. “So what’s the plan here?”
Caleb shoved his hands in his pockets and eyed the building. “She’s familiar with this place, right?”
I circled around the car to be closer to Zane; I felt better standing near him. “Remy Summore is. Joachim is not. So I don’t see how we’re going to get him to the club.”
Caleb turned back and grinned at me, his face boyish except for the stark tattoo encircling his eye. It looked like a demonic monocle. “Bait, of course.”
I crossed my arms over my chest. “Yeah, I got that. But I don’t see how that’s going to work.”
He hopped over the
railing of the steps leading up to the front door and pulled out a large ring of keys. “Once Joachim knows you’re here, he’ll come. At least, I hope he will.”
I leaned against the side of the car. “Yeah, well, if you think I’m going to let you tie me behind the car and drag me a few miles to leave a scent trail, you’re wrong.”
Caleb glanced backward at me, his eyes lit up with an excitement that I didn’t share. “We don’t need to do anything as drastic as that. We just need your blood.”
That sounded ominous.
Ethan frowned and stepped in front of me, holding the bo staff before us as if it could hold back the evils of the world. “I do not approve of this.”
I wasn’t too keen on it, either. I glanced over at Zane. He wouldn’t let Caleb dice me up. “Exactly how does this plan work?”
“There are old symbols that, when drawn, act like beacons,” Caleb answered. He pulled a paper out of his pocket and began to unfold it. “Symbols of intense power that can be keyed to lure a specific creature in a variety of ways.” He finished unfolding the paper and held it out to me.
I took it from him, uncertain as to what I was looking at. Black scrawls of arcane symbols filled the page, written inside a dark double circle. “What exactly am I looking at here?”
Caleb moved to my side, extending his pinky to point at the paper. “The outer circle must be drawn with chalk. It binds the symbol. The inner circle allows us to set what sort of symbol we want. This particular circle is a beacon, so we’re going to use a food item to invite the creature in. Maybe a circle of coffee grounds. Depends on what the club has.”
“And the interior symbols? There’s a lot of those.”
“Those allow us to pull the type of creature we want—specifically, an angel.” His pinky glided over the symbols as if tracing them into his memory.
“So why do you need my blood?”
“The host of our particular angel is a succubus, so we need succubus blood as the medium for the symbols.” Caleb’s mouth quirked in an unapologetic smile. “If it was a human, we could use their blood, but alas.”
I turned to Zane, questioning the validity of Caleb’s claim. His expression was grim as he shoved another cigarette in his mouth. “He’s right. I don’t like it either, but I don’t see that we have many choices.”
Ethan shook his head, long ponytail swinging. “I swore to Noah that I would keep you safe, Jackie Brighton, and this is dangerous. Letting vampires bleed you out is not keeping you safe.”
Zane straightened and moved to stand in front of Ethan. He laid a hand on the bo staff, and his jaw clenched. “Are you saying that I’m threatening Jackie’s life? Did Noah send you up here to be a watchdog for him? To keep her away from me?” he sneered.
Okay, this was going to get ugly fast. I stepped between the two men. “We don’t have much time and I’m a big girl. It’s just a little blood. No problem. Really.” I turned to Ethan, who had his jaw set in a mulish frown. “Really. It’s fine.”
He leaned in, the smooth angles of his face appealing in the moonlight. “Succubus, do you say this because he thinks you should do it, or because you think you should do it?”
What a crappily accurate thing to say. I shoved Ethan’s shoulder. “Ease off. It’s just a little blood amongst immortals. It’s not going to kill me.”
“No,” said Ethan. “But this demon-possessed succubus will almost certainly kill all of us. Are you sure it is worth one life for all of ours?”
I stared down at my small sneakers on the pavement, sandwiched between Ethan’s large boots and Zane’s Doc Martens. And I thought of Remy. My laughing, easygoing friend with the effervescent personality and sunny smile. Remy was four hundred years old, and she’d seen a lifetime’s worth—several lifetimes—of bad shit, but nothing as bad as I’d inflicted on her. She’d taken me in and taken me under her wing without a second thought. Succubi had to stick together, she’d said, and we were the only two in New City.
And what had that gotten her? Possessed by a demonic entity and her life in turmoil. Just because she’d tried to help me out, and I was too stupid and new to listen.
“I’m going to help her,” I said softly. “She’s my friend. Succubi stick together. That’s what we do.”
“Then that is what we shall do,” said Ethan.
I pushed off of the car and began to cut across the parking lot. Zane and Ethan fell in behind me. “Come on,” I said. “Let’s find a knife before I chicken out on this.”
Cutting one’s wrist open? Not as easy as Ethan had made it look. After giving my skin a surface graze, I chickened out and had to have Ethan do it for me. I sat on the metal folding chair that we’d pulled out into the parking lot specifically for this task, and waited for Ethan to strike.
“Okay, I’m ready—”
Before I could finish speaking, Ethan grabbed my arm and sliced it open.
I screeched like a banshee. “Oh my God!”
“Quiet, Succubus. Someone will think you are being murdered in the parking lot,” Ethan said in a reasonable voice.
“You could have freaking warned me!” A seeming flood of red blood was coursing down my arm. Dear God, that hurt. There was pain and there was pain, and this was some serious hardcore pain.
All business, Ethan ignored my howls. He tilted my arm downward so the blood flowed steadily into a pitcher he’d retrieved from the club. “You must do unpleasant things quickly, Succubus. Bandages must be ripped off with haste in order to spare further pain.”
Further pain? I was going to black out from this alone. I whimpered, blinking rapidly to fight back the tears that threatened to overwhelm me. So much for hanging with the big boys. Ethan hadn’t given so much as a sniff when he cut his own wrist. Me, I was ready to bawl like a baby.
Ethan was the only calm one, too. Caleb had disappeared into the club to start preparing the symbol. Zane had opted to stay near me, but it was obvious that this was an entirely new sort of hell. He paced in the parking lot, coat rustling around his rapidly moving legs. Back and forth he paced, back and forth, and his hand tore through his tousled black hair repeatedly. I wasn’t sure if it was because he didn’t like seeing me in pain or if the smell of blood was getting to him.
Probably both. Either way, he was making me antsy.
“How much blood do we need?” I asked in a little while. I didn’t know how much Caleb would need to paint the symbols, but the bottom of the pitcher was red with blood, and I was feeling a little light-headed. “You’re going to leave me enough so I don’t pass out, I hope.”
“This is enough,” said Ethan, grabbing my arm and tilting it upward to slow the blood loss. Succubi had rapid healing, but it’d still take me a while to heal a cut that deep.
Zane moved in closer, his arms crossed over his chest as he regarded me. “She okay?”
“You should lick it,” Ethan told Zane suddenly.
Heat flared and I felt the Itch come to life, like some sick puppy dog that had heard its name being called. Down, girl, down. “Lick me?” I repeated, just because I liked saying it.
Zane’s brows furrowed as he moved to my side. “What did you just say?”
Ethan held up my wrist. “You should lick her wound. It will heal her faster. She is in great pain.”
“I’m not sure this is such a good idea,” I began, my voice husky with desire. It sounded like an amazing idea, but I didn’t want Zane to get hurt by the collar.
“I will take the blood to Caleb so he can finish the symbol,” Ethan said, eyes flashing with that strange feeding light of his. “And I will leave you two alone so the vampire may … lick you.” His voice became strangled at the end, as if it had finally occurred to him what he was saying. He gave us both a quick bow. “I shall return shortly.”
Before I could protest, his back was to us and Zane held my wrist in his hands, as if torn by his decision.
“You don’t have to,” I said softly. “It doesn’t hurt that much.”
&n
bsp; He glanced over at me from the corner of his eyes, his mouth curving into a smile. “You’re a terrible liar.”
“I am,” I said with a wobbly smile. “It hurts like a bitch. But I don’t want you to get hurt trying to help me out. Exchanging my wound for yours doesn’t make it right.”
He just licked his lips. And after a long moment in which I did not breathe, he extended his tongue and licked my wrist, from the top of the cut to the bottom. Slow, sensual, and erotic.
My blood pulsed heavy in my veins, my gaze drawn to his tongue as it moved over my skin. The Itch had flared, making my nerve endings painfully aware. I wanted him badly. His mouth sensually made love to my arm, lapping at the blood that spilled from the cut, teasing me even.
I was so hot and bothered watching him seal the wound. Who would have thought that cut wrists could be so very exciting?
He grimaced after a moment, and I saw a hint of fang. Zane paused, breathing hard, and I caught the ever-so-faint sizzle of the collar again.
I jerked my hand out of his grasp. “It’s hurting you, you big idiot. Why didn’t you say something?”
Zane looked at me through slitted eyes, and wiped my blood from his bottom lip in a motion that made me want to lick him all over. “Because I enjoyed it far too much, Princess. I could lick you for hours. Days.”
“That’s … nice,” I said in a breathy voice. Very, very nice. So nice that I wouldn’t be able to think straight for the next few minutes.
“Come on,” said Zane, after nuzzling my wrist for a moment longer. “Let’s get you inside and make sure that you’re safe.”
I nodded and let him lead me in to the club.
Despite the cheerful lights in the windows of the bar, the interior was dark. Spookily so. I released Zane’s hand and used mine to feel out the interior. “Can we get a few lights on in here?”
A light switch flicked on, and Zane grinned at me. “I thought you liked being in the dark with me.”
Even from here, I could hear the collar sizzle. “Simmer down there, Romeo, or you’re going to burn a hole through your neck.” I peered around the long, curving bar. “I don’t see Caleb. Is he downstairs?”
