by Lexi Blake
Even as I thought it, I could see the flow slowing. The vampire pulled back, startled, and checked her prey’s neck. It was closed now and though the Hunter seemed the tiniest bit woozy, he was still on his feet.
“What magnificent prey I have found this evening!” she exclaimed with a happy sigh. “He’s like the other. Their powers of healing are amazing. I’m full yet they live to feed me again on the morrow.”
“I’m happy for the two of you. Now, how about we celebrate your newfound interdependence and untie me?”
Her mouth was covered in blood and it dripped down her white dress but she was surprising unselfconscious. “I think not. I think you would attempt to save the shapeshifter. I think you would fight me.”
“Absolutely not,” I promised, lying through my teeth. “Take ‘em both. You were right. He was a crappy guard or I wouldn’t have ended up here.”
She moved in close, and I could smell the stench of decay on her. I tried to move away from it, but there was no place to go. “Be careful, little girl. We do not take kindly to liars.”
I took a deep breath and prayed she didn’t use that nasty, needed-a-manicure, finger on me. “All right, I’ll tell you the truth, then. If you give me my wolf and let me go free, then I’ll leave your forest and I won’t return.” I left out the part about sending Danny back to deal with her, but I doubted seriously she could handle Daniel.
The vampire looked at me. “And what do I get in return for giving you my prize?”
I looked into her dead eyes and I was extremely serious about my offer. “If you give me my wolf and untie me, in exchange, I promise not to hunt you down and kill you.”
Her laughter rang through the air, breaking the quiet of the forest. “You’re most amusing, human. I would enjoy watching the large ogre chew on your bones, but I’ll allow you a private death. I need to take my new love to my home and settle in for a nice long evening. Good luck to you.”
She turned and when she walked back the way she’d come, the Hunter followed her without a single glance back at the woman he’d intended not to hurt. I was left alone in the middle of the forest, staked out and bloodied. I was the perfect feast for a hungry ogre.
Barghest whined beside me. He obviously wondered if he should follow his master, but I assumed that last hand gesture had been a stay command and though there wasn’t much the dogs could do to help, I was glad I wasn’t alone.
Shuck lay down on top of my feet and closed his eyes. At least someone was getting something out of this.
The Hunter and his new lady friend disappeared into the wilderness. I made note of the direction they were going because I had every intention of making good on my promise. I was going to hunt down that vampire and I was going to get Lee back.
There was a rumble in the distance and it sounded like something big was walking my way. I started pulling at my bindings in earnest now because the ogre was coming and I was almost out of time.
Chapter Fourteen
I looked at Barghest, the dog not asleep at my feet. “Hey, buddy,” I said in my brightest voice. “You want to pull that knife out of the sheath and cut through these ties? I’ll give you a treat.”
Big black eyes looked up at me with zero intelligence in them. He did that doggie smile thing and popped up to lick my face. It was sweet and not helpful in our current situation. At my feet, Shuck began to snore, his enormous body rising and falling with his deep breaths. I was in a place filled with unique and magical creatures and I got stuck with two dumb dogs.
Closing my eyes, I started to work on the bindings on my hands. I had tried to hold them apart to make the loop as large as I could while the Hunter was tying me up so I would have some wiggle room when I relaxed. I was happy to find that this ploy, unlike everything else I had tried tonight, worked. I had a small but significant amount of slack to work with. The rope burned, but I continued my struggle. If I bled, it would just serve as a handy lubricant to grease the wheels a bit. I managed to get the ropes almost down to the first joint of my thumb when I heard something moving in the distance. The sound came from the direction the Hunter and I had entered the woods earlier in the evening. I picked up the pace, working the ropes hard because while I thought the ogre would come from the opposite direction, I’d already had an encounter with a nasty-ass vampire, so I wasn’t taking any chances. These damn woods were more crowded than Ether’s dance floor.
The dogs sat up and thumped their tails happily, barking to let me know that a friend was coming. Shuck ran off to greet whoever was walking our way.
I was happy to see it was one pissed-off werewolf.
“Zoey Donovan.” Neil strode out of the bushes looking incredibly out of place in his perfectly pressed sky blue pajamas and red velvet smoking jacket. He looked like he should be in a Doris Day film rather than walking through the woods looking for a wayward charge. He stood staring at me for a long moment, his slippered feet tapping against the forest floor. I tried to speak, but he gave me an imperious shake of his index finger that told me he needed a moment. After what seemed like forever, he finally spoke. “The funny thing is, of all the things I thought I would see when I caught up with you, this was number three.”
I thought about that. “God, Neil, what were one and two?”
“You don’t even want to know.” He crossed his arms over his chest and stared me down with his icy blue eyes. “I’m going to kill you for this.”
“Kill me later. Untie me now.” I said it with a smile because of all the people to come looking for me, he was the best. He could yell at me all he liked if he saved me from being something an ogre had to pick out of his teeth and then chose not to mention the incident to either of my husbands. I was going to owe him big time.
“Oh no, sister.” He stood before me, his face a mask of indignation. “You’re going to stand there because I don’t know who did this to you but I know why. You were intensely obnoxious and whoever tied your ass up got tired of dealing with your shit. My only regret at this point is that they forgot to gag you. It was a serious misstep on their part.”
“Neil, sweetie,” I started, keeping my voice calm because I deserved his lecture. I deserved far more than that, and I hoped he would calm down when he realized I wasn’t going to argue with him.
“I went to get you a nice cup of tea,” he said, stomping his slippered foot and completely ignoring my pleas. “I made Albert get up out of his comfy bed and make you a hot cup of chamomile since you’d had such an awful day. I was going to massage your poor pregnant feet and listen to you tell me all about how hard it is to have two gorgeous, filthy rich men who love you. Do you want to know what I found when I quietly entered your room?”
“You found I had left the building?” I asked because the answer was so obvious but seemed to require a response.
“You were gone,” he said as if I weren’t even speaking. “Oh, you made sure to pull the curtains closed so I spent a good five minutes talking to an empty bed. It was a nice touch. I tried to coax you out by revealing the deepest parts of my soul to you. I had a long conversation about how worried I get about Chad being with the Council and in Louis Marini’s clutches. I worry every day about losing him just like you’re worried about losing Dev. It was a bonding moment for us. Unfortunately, one of us was missing.”
“We need to go, Neil.”
“Do you have any idea how hard Daniel will come down on me when he finds out you gave me the slip? Why the hell would you sneak out on me? You’re a pregnant married lady. You have to stop giving your bodyguards the slip so you can go parading through the woods doing god knows what. Daniel is going to kill me. He’s going to bring in some other wolf to be your guard when Lee isn’t around. How do you think that makes me feel, Z? Are you trying to hurt me? Is this because I left and you died in Vegas?”
“No, Neil.” I never meant to cause turmoil between the two of us. Sometimes Neil was my only touchstone. There were times when I couldn’t talk to Danny and Dev, and that only
left Neil. He was my best friend. “I was being stupid, babe. This has to do with me making dumbass moves not with me being angry with you. I don’t blame you for anything. I was just out here because I thought it would save Dev.”
Shuck started to bark and Barghest joined in, but Neil and I were too busy working on our relationship to really pay attention. “Daniel blames me. He blames me for what happened in Vegas. It’s why he won’t talk to me except to bark orders since we came home from Colorado.”
“Danny will come around,” I promised. I meant it, too. Danny had to come around because I knew deep down he cared about Neil. There were years when no one in Daniel’s life had known the truth about him, but he’d trusted Neil and Neil hadn’t broken his trust until Chad had decided to become Daniel’s spy. It was easier for Dev to forgive Neil since he wasn’t as invested in their friendship. Dev had forgiven Neil because he knew it would make me happy. Danny’s feelings about the situation went a lot deeper than that.
“I doubt that he’s going to come around if he hasn’t already. You just have to face facts. Daniel is done with me and we just have to be civil for your sake.” He was quiet for a moment before relaxing slightly. “So, let’s have the story. How exactly did you end up playing a bondage girl? Have you found a fourth to tie you up and play dirty games with?”
I thought about that for a moment. “Would he be a fourth or a fifth?”
Neil smiled. “Oh, yeah, I forgot about Bris. I don’t think he should count since he looks just like Dev.”
“If you think about it that way, then Declan would be a freebie.”
A look of complete horror passed over Neil’s face and he shuddered at the thought. “Oh, there’s nothing free about that hot mess. He looks exactly like Dev so he’s hot as hell but god…not even I would go there. Now stop trying to derail my important venting session with sex talk,” Neil commanded as both the black dogs were now on their feet, growling low in their throats at something in the distance.
“Neil, it’s time to head out.” I pulled and tugged at the ropes in absolute earnest. I trusted the black dogs’ instincts.
“Furthermore, what made you think you had to lie to me? I can see lying to Daniel and Dev. They’re just husbands. They cause all sorts of trouble. But me? I’m your best friend.”
“Neil,” I growled as I saw the trees start to move across the pond.
“I’m the guy who helped hide the whole ‘I’m probably pregnant’ thing until you had to ruin it by actually being pregnant. I’m the guy who didn’t tell Danny it was you who ‘accidentally’ left a Justin Bieber CD playing full blast on his stereo while he was in a dead stupor and couldn’t get up to turn it off. And you hit repeat. I’m the guy who didn’t tell Dev that the boo hag who took up residence in Ether last year was your client.”
“You’re also the guy who’s about to be eaten by an ogre if you don’t stop bitching at me and get me the hell out of here,” I explained to him in a bitter groan as I saw the shadow of the ogre moving toward us.
“What?” Neil practically screamed the question and then did what he should have done in the first place. He breathed in the night air. He let it saturate his senses, and it was obvious he didn’t like what he smelled. He shuddered. “You followed the Hunter out here and he tied you up to feed you to an ogre and there’s something else, something rotty and gross.”
Now he was trying to get me untied. He tugged as hard as he could. “The Hunter didn’t mean to feed me to the ogre. He meant to use me as bait. The rotty gross thing is Lee’s new girlfriend, who also happens to be a baobhan sith.”
“Honey, I don’t know what that is.” He pulled one of the knives out of my thigh sheath. He brought it around to my back, slicing through the rope. “Use your English words.”
I sighed as the rope went slack and my hands were finally, blissfully free. “It’s a faery vampire. She lures hunters away in the night and has her way with them. She has both Lee and the Hunter.”
Neil looked over my shoulder as I massaged my wrists, trying to get them to come back to life. I took the cold iron knife back because Neil wasn’t big on weapons. He preferred to use his claws and teeth. “Holy shit, that’s big. We should run, Z.”
I pulled the gun out from the back of my denim shorts and clicked the safety off. “Running won’t help. He knows we’re here. He’ll follow us. You should change now, Neil.”
The dogs were seriously agitated. The hair on the back of their necks was standing straight up and they were in a crouching position, getting ready to pounce. The ogre moved toward us, though he was moving slowly. He would adjust his speed to match ours. As long as we didn’t run, he wouldn’t overexert himself. Even moving carefully, I could hear him. He sounded like a herd of buffalo, and he was definitely a mouth breather.
Neil started taking off his clothes. He stepped out of his slippers and shrugged out of the vintage jacket. He then took the time to neatly fold it.
“Hey, Monk, no time for neat,” I taunted as I got behind the tree I was previously tied to. “Just do that thing where you change and your clothes kind of explode around you. Let’s go.”
Neil huffed as he continued his OCD ritual. As he spoke, he painstakingly unbuttoned each pearl fastener on his pajama top. “If you had been where you were supposed to be, you would know that my boyfriend gave this to me and I don’t want it to be in a million pieces on the forest floor. He said the red made a lovely contrast with my eyes. That was part of our one-sided conversation. Do you know how much of my wardrobe I have to toss out because you need me to do a quick change? Of course, if you’d been where you were supposed to be, we wouldn’t be dealing with that. OMG, that is nasty.”
The ogre was standing not twenty feet away from us, and even I could smell the nasty thing. It smelled like rotting meat and atrocious BO. It stood at least nine feet tall and had to weigh close to five hundred pounds. Someone had made a type of tunic for it to wear, but it had seen better days. It mostly hung in tatters around the ogre’s strong frame. The pieces that were together were stained and unsightly. He hunched over and from my vantage point, I could see his back was humped. His hair was scraggly and he was missing a couple of teeth. It wouldn’t matter, though. He still had plenty left to do a fine job of chewing me up.
Neil stood beside me, finally naked, having protected his precious PJs that I was pretty sure Chad would have bought him more of had he understood our dire circumstances. Neil’s hands were on his well-sculpted hips as the ogre looked us over. “Shouldn’t he be doing something? What is the thing in his hand?”
“I think that’s a tree,” I noted. The ogre did, indeed, appear to have hijacked a small tree to use as a blunt instrument.
As if on cue, the ogre lifted his club and roared. The dogs jumped into action. They each took a side and started working in tandem to torment the creature dead set on having them for a late-night snack. One would grab his attention with barking and growls and the other would rush in and take a quick bite out of a handy target. Before I could even think to line up a shot, Barghest and Shuck had taken several hunks out of the ogre’s feet and legs.
“Don’t think this discussion of ours is over.” Neil sent me a forbidding look just before he changed.
His muscles moved and flowed impossibly. He leaned over and with a preternatural grace shifted from human to wolf. Neil’s wolf was the most beautiful I’d ever seen. He was arctic white and he stared at me with his glacial blue eyes. He barked and even though he couldn’t speak when he was in wolf form, he had no problem making himself understood. That one bark told me to stay put and let him handle the situation. He joined the black dogs just as the ogre tried to bring his tree trunk down on Shuck’s head.
I wasn’t going to be able to follow Neil’s admonition, I realized as I watched the scene from behind the tree. The dogs just couldn’t make enough of a dent. The ogre was still interested in me. He was moving my direction, and I didn’t think that was going to stop anytime soon.
; Neil barked and started in on the ogre’s backside, but the ogre swatted at the trio like they were pesky mosquitoes. If I didn’t do something soon, one of them was going to get seriously hurt.
I stepped out from behind the tree, leveled my Ruger, and took a firing position. I popped off three quick rounds to his chest and realized I’d probably made a huge mistake. If I had thought the big dude was interested in me before, now he was obsessed. My cold iron bullets were apparently much more painful than the doggy love bites, and the ogre roared.
I backed up instinctively, but hit the tree I’d been tied to previously. I tripped over Neil’s slippers and fell to the ground, landing on my butt just as the giant homicidal tree-wielding ogre took a swing at me. I heard a mighty crack as the tree above me took the full force of the club and split in the exact spot where my head would have been.
I rolled to the left, getting out of the way of his second attack.
Neil was swiping at the ogre with his claws when he was thrown off his prey’s back and landed right on his spine with a hurt bark. I winced, but he was up in no time, growling threateningly as he circled the ogre, trying to make himself into the target.
I stood still as the ogre watched the dogs and Neil. He suddenly moved his hands and swiped the ground with his club. Barghest and Shuck were struck full on by the enormous tree trunk and they landed somewhere in the forest with a thud. Neil was more agile than the black dogs and he leapt gracefully over the sweeping trunk. The ogre was plainly unhappy that his prey had avoided the trap.
He roared, his shout of rage causing the trees around me to shake their leaves. It also had the unintended effect of leaving the ogre standing still. He was a perfect target and I took advantage. I stood up and fired three more times into his huge body.
