“I told you that you would be rewarded for delivering Isla to me, and you will be.” The affection he displayed for Isla’s supposed friend disappeared when he turned his gaze on the woman who he claimed was of his blood. “Now, Isla, I hate to rush things along, but I need your blood to return me to health. This celebration of my return to greatness cannot be completed until I do.”
Isla looked to the only person she could think of for help—Jessie, the woman who had been her friend for so many years. Utterly betrayed, she wondered if Jessie and Sloane knew one another.
“How did you get here so fast?” It was not the most pressing question that Isla had, but it was all that she could phrase at the moment.
“Having friends in high places—friends with private jets—is a handy thing.” Jessie smirked, then watched with apparent satisfaction as Lucian began to advance on Isla. She did nothing to stop him.
Chapter 8
They knew he was coming. There was no way to avoid that when he was using his body as a battering ram against the heavily barred, ancient wooden door inside the house.
When he had come to Vampire Island, he had wanted peace—he had seen enough death for any one creature’s lifetime. Still without a qualm he had broken the necks of the two guards who were stationed throughout St. Baptiste’s house. These creatures were protecting a fiend.
And worse—they were keeping him from Isla.
He had managed to extract the location of this room from a guard before breaking his neck as well—to kill a vampire the head had to be severed from the body. Not at all pleasant, so he preferred to injure them in ways that would take them months to heal from. His shoulder ached, but he kept at it until the door finally gave way, splintering inward in a violent explosion.
He burst through, searching the room for his woman. The massive ballroom was a grotesque sight, an orgy the likes of which he hadn’t seen since his days in ancient Rome. His stare cut through the swathes of flesh. Many there stared at him with alarm, and some merely flicked their gazes at him before continuing on.
At the far end of the room was Isla. Fury pounded through him when he saw the way in which she was displayed, bound to the wooden frame like an offering.
She was wearing one of his shirts. The realization snapped the final, primal puzzle piece together inside of him. Vampires didn’t always mate in this way, this chemical sort of bond, but those who did were bonded for life.
That was his woman. The frail vampire dressed like Dracula was surely Lucian, and he was advancing on her slowly, an animal toying with its prey.
It had been years since Sloane had had to race across a battlefield, but muscle memory took control. He vaulted over the writhing bodies. He had no plan other than to get the ancient vampire away from Isla, and he halted in a crouch, hissing, his fangs bared when Lucian turned on him.
“This is none of your concern.” His first impression of Lucian St. Baptiste was one of shock. He had known that the vampire was in failing health, but the white skin of the man was tinted with a sickly green hue that Sloane had never before seen on another vampire.
More than that, though, the shock came from recognition.
“Luca?” Sloane had lived too long to be stopped dead in his tracks, but when he saw the man who had once been his closest human friend standing so frail yet deadly in front of Sloane’s woman, Sloane’s quick mind had trouble keeping up.
“Goldhawk. It’s been a long time.” His voice was soft, but Sloane heard the hatred that lay beneath it. Grief washed over Sloane in a great wave.
He had earned that hatred when he had tried to turn Luca’s sister. Luca—Lucian—had ended their friendship and sworn vengeance on the hellish creature who had broken his beloved sister’s mind.
Now Luca was a vampire himself, a very sick one. And he had a look in his eyes that told Sloane that Luca was close to death and had nothing to lose.
It wasn’t a good sign.
“She is mine.” The voice issuing from his own throat was raspy and harsh, his beast taking over control. He knew that he would have to push through his shock and his guilt if he wanted to save Isla, though he still didn’t know why Lucian wanted her. “Let her go and I’ll let you live.”
Lucian cackled out a laugh in response, and Sloane realized that he had done perhaps too good a job at hiding his tracks before coming to the island. The old vampire had no idea that he had once been a ruthless killing machine.
It would have been easier if the vampire had feared him. Then he could have saved Isla from what was about to come.
If he had any hope of her accepting his claim on her, it would be best for her not to see what happened when two vampires fought.
“She was mine before she was ever yours, Goldhawk. As was Ana.” With a flick of his wrists, a long, lethal blade slid out of Lucian’s coat sleeves and into each hand. Sloane eyed the swords warily. They didn’t make his task—freeing Isla—impossible, but they certainly complicated it. He had no weapon besides his bare hands.
And his fangs, which he bared at the older vampire. From the corner of his eye he saw Isla flinch at the display, and sickness rolled through him.
He shook it off. He could try to change her mind about him after. Right now, he had to save her.
“You let your thirst for vengeance cloud your judgment, St. Baptiste.” Slowly standing from his crouch, Sloane circled the vampire. He was aware of the vampires and fangers throughout the room slowly halting the feeding and the fucking, curious about the scene being played out before them.
If they decided to protect their master, then he was screwed.
The light of insanity flashed through Lucian’s eyes as the insult hit him. Sloane was frozen for a moment longer than he would have been normally because the madness he saw in Lucian’s eyes was a mirror of what he’d once seen in Ana’s.
Lucian cackled again and lunged for Sloane with the blades, showing surprising strength and skill for someone who appeared so frail.
Sloane managed to wrest one of the blades from the other vampire’s grasp. It sliced his palm open in the process, and his blood, darker and thicker than that of a human’s, oozed to the floor.
If he survived this, he would have to drink—drink live blood, human blood.
It only made him more determined not to lose any more.
“I should never have invited you to the island, but it was too tempting to have my enemy so close at hand. Keep your friends close and your enemies closer...is that not the saying?” Lucian sneered, clearly furious at being divested of one of his blades and thereby humiliated. “And now you have complicated things immeasurably between me and my great—well, we won’t count the generations, will we, dear? My great-granddaughter many generations removed.” Lucian cast a look of pure lust over his shoulder, directed at Isla, and even as a puzzle piece fell into place the fury and need to protect her overcame him.
Sloane lunged at Lucian with his blade, and the frail vampire parried back. The naked female who was inexplicably hovering around the group squealed and moved closer to Isla, who was yanking on her bonds with desperation and increasing determination, snarling like a caged animal.
The rest of the room was silent and still, clearly waiting to see which way the chips fell. Fangers cared for nothing but their next fix, and vampires were opportunistic and sought self-preservation above all.
Sloane’s world narrowed as he fell into the rhythm of a skill that he hadn’t practiced for several hundreds of years. He stared down the length of the silver blade, his attention focused on defeating the enemy.
Lucian feinted left. Sloane would have been able to recover, but Isla’s sharp cry of concern was so potent, ringing through his being, that he was distracted. The split-second look that he cast her way found Lucian’s blade sliding through the flesh of his gut, and the searing pain radiated all the way out to his fingertips.
As the floor sped up to meet him he twisted and, determined to ensure Isla’s safety and with every remaining
particle of strength left inside of him, he slashed his blade down with brutal force.
His aim was true, severing Lucian’s head from his body. Relief flooded through him even as his world went black and still.
Marcus would send Isla away from the island, away from this Luana he had spoken of. She would return to the calm life that she had had before they had ever met.
She would be safe.
* * *
Isla’s world fell out from beneath her.
Sagging in her chains, she let numbness wash over her entire body.
Sloane was dead.
Sloane was a vampire.
Sloane had died protecting her.
She wanted to weep but felt frozen inside. Only the faint sound of Jessie’s rasping breath saved her from an abyss of ice.
Her eyes dry, she turned to the woman she had thought was her best friend in the world. For a woman who didn’t make friends easily, the betrayal was all the worse.
“Why would you do this, Jessie?” The other woman turned to her, and Isla saw that the Jessie who had once been her friend was not readily apparent in the pale, emaciated creature who stood before her. Though Jessie was the one who had led her into all of this in the first place, Isla couldn’t help but feel a stirring of pity for the person who looked at her with wild eyes.
The pupils were hugely dilated, nearly swallowing the pale blue of her eyes. If Isla had still lived in the reality that she had known back home, she would have thought that Jessie was high on some kind of drug.
Gooseflesh prickled over the lawyer’s naked frame. Her neck was streaked with blood that was still sticky. Someone had fed on her, not that long ago. “Don’t feel pity for me,” said Jessie. Isla had always displayed her emotions clearly on her face. “I made this choice. When Lucian contacted me, told me about this island, I was loyal to you. But then he showed me the pleasure of being bitten. It’s the ultimate high. He offered me a lifetime here, where I would be regarded as a goddess for providing blood.”
Isla’s eyes flickered over to the prone figure of Sloane, lying on the ground. Though she knew that it was just wishful thinking, she thought that she had seen his fingers twitch.
Now she tore her stare away from her lover and returned it to Jessie, incredulous.
“That’s why you set me up?” If Jessie had given her up so easily, she’d never truly been Isla’s friend, but even that realization didn’t help to assuage the burning pain. “For a high and the potential to be seen as an expensive wine?”
Jessie snarled, looking more like one of the vampires who had fed off her than human, at least to Isla’s eyes. Pain threatened to break her heart in two.
Jessie had been her friend since university. Her only close friend. She had helped Isla through her trials with her mother, had listened to her crushes, had pushed her out of her comfort zone.
The woman staring back at her was not the Jessie she had known. With a grief that threatened to tear her in two, Isla understood that, whatever Lucian had done to Jessie, her sweet friend was not in that body anymore.
“You would never understand. You’re never happy with what you have. You’re beautiful and you have a solid job, even if you don’t meet your mother’s fancy-ass standards. You have me as a sidekick so that you can feel better about yourself.”
“What are you talking about?” Her disbelief was genuine and gut deep. Just as she had always played the ugly, unsuccessful duckling to her sisters, she had felt the lesser of the pairing in her friendship with Jessie, though she knew that the other woman also had self-esteem issues—it was how they had originally bonded.
She had never perceived any inequality in their friendship. From the slightly crazed look on Jessie’s face, and the lengths to which she had gone to differentiate herself, apparently Isla had been wrong.
“It was delicious to be told why your mother hates you so much.” Jessie bent and took the silver blade that had sliced through Lucian’s flesh into her hand. Lifting it to her lips, she licked at the vampire’s blood, which coated the metal. Closing her eyes as if in reverence, she shuddered with apparent pleasure as she swallowed.
“What?” Isla pulled at her bonds, ignoring the pain, though her skin was rubbed raw beneath them. “You...what?”
“You’ll love this.” Jessie stalked close, as if she was about to share a secret with her best friend.
They would never be friends again.
“Lucian told me all about it, last night when he...welcomed...me to the island.” The satisfaction in Jessie’s voice told Isla exactly how Lucian had welcomed the other woman to the island, and she shuddered with revulsion. “Your mother...she knows all about your vampire heritage. So do your sisters. When it became apparent that you were the first to finally be born vampire, rather than just a carrier, she decided to keep it a secret from you. She didn’t want the shame of having a bloodthirsty beast for a daughter.”
Isla’s mind reeled. Deep in pain, she was having a hard time keeping up.
“I’m not a vampire.” With a shudder, she looked out over the room, over the creatures who were sucking the life force from humans. “I’m human.”
Jessie laughed mirthlessly, moving closer still. Isla felt the heat of the other woman’s breath on her neck.
“The change doesn’t happen unless you’re around your own kind.” Realization slammed into Isla as her mind ran down the list of all the strange changes that she’d noticed in the past few days. “And now that you’ve changed, Lucian needs your blood to get well again.”
“He was using you, Jessie.” Isla could see that more clearly than anything else. “You were a means to an end for him, nothing more.”
The other woman shrieked, slapping her palm across Isla’s cheek. It stung, but Isla felt none of the heat, the rush of blood, that should have accompanied such a blow. “Lucian told me that he was going to turn me as a reward for bringing you to him. You would feed him and die, and then I would be the special one.” Jessie moved until she was mere inches from Isla, and Isla trembled as Jessie traced the blade up her calf and inner thigh.
She wanted to look past Jessie, wanted to stare at Sloane as she died, but she couldn’t see past the taller woman.
“You’ve ruined it all for me now. I don’t know if I’ll even be allowed to stay here, without Lucian.” Isla wondered if vampire blood acted as some kind of upper to humans because Jessie was starting to tremble with nervous energy. Still, even with her shaking hand, she traced the blade farther, up to Isla’s throat.
Isla held her breath and closed her eyes.
Jessie’s scream was loud, shrill and all too human, echoing right in Isla’s ear. Isla’s eyes flew open and her body tensed in time to see a large hand wrap around the other woman’s throat.
“Jessie!” She couldn’t help her concern—the revelations of the past few minutes couldn’t wipe away years of friendship, in her mind anyway.
What she saw then made her throat go dry.
Sloane stood a foot away from her, holding Jessie effortlessly by the throat. Her feet dangled off the floor, and she clawed at Sloane’s fingers with her own.
Sloane looked at Isla full-on, and her heart leaped with joy and disbelief. How was he standing there? Lucian had thrust the sword right into Sloane’s gut.
The gash was visible in his T-shirt, the cotton shredded and caked with blood. The skin beneath was red and angry looking but smooth and whole.
Isla’s mouth fell open and her heart stuttered.
Sloane was alive. He was pale and feral-looking—but alive. He had just healed from a fatal wound in mere minutes.
Her mind couldn’t process it any more than she could process the fangs protruding from his upper jaw. His face was drawn and pale, and though she knew next to nothing about vampires, if she had to hazard a guess, she would think that he needed to drink blood to replace what he had lost, which was spread out in a viscous pool on the floor behind him.
“I will kill her for what she’s done to
you.” His eyes on Isla, Sloane set Jessie down on the floor again, keeping his hand clasped around her neck. He paused, and Isla understood that he was waiting for her to give her consent.
Isla shook her head violently and struggled against her bonds. She was done. She wanted to go home.
“No. Please, don’t.” Finally, she felt her throat thicken and tears prickle at the backs of her eyes. “I won’t have that on my conscience. Just—just leave her here.” She was going to suggest that Sloane drink from the woman because he clearly needed to, but she couldn’t bear the thought. Jessie had said that being bitten by a vampire was a source of extreme pleasure.
She didn’t deserve that. More, Isla didn’t like the idea of Jessie being in such an intimate situation with Sloane.
Terrifying as his fangs were, he was hers.
As if sensing her struggle, he took his hand off Jessie’s neck and deliberately stepped away, moving smoothly toward Isla.
“I don’t drink from fangers.” He seemed on the verge of saying something else, but then he knelt in front of Isla and placed his fingers on her ankle to remove her bond, and she couldn’t help it.
She shrank away from him.
As if she had physically struck him, he seemed to retreat, just for a moment. Inserting a finger between the metal and her ankle, he snapped the bond in half, then repeated the movement with her other foot.
When he stood up to release her wrists, his face was carefully blank of emotion. He had also retracted his fangs. He still looked wan and weak.
“Sloane. I—” Isla wanted to say that she was sorry, but the words stuck in her throat.
She massaged her wrists, wincing as the blood flowed back into her hands. She was so ashamed and so nervous that her heart beat triple time, her every muscle tensed to flee.
This was Sloane. He had never shown any drive to hurt her, and he had had ample opportunity.
Still, she couldn’t erase from her mind the terrifying image of him with his fangs fully extended.
“Do you trust me?” Isla looked up sharply. Sloane’s words were brusque, his voice harsh. She turned halfway to look at Jessie, who was crouching on the floor now, at the edge of the vampires who watched the scene play out before them.
Darkest Desire of the Vampire: Wicked in MoonlightVampire Island (Harlequin Nocturne) Page 22
