by Connie Hall
The two were so similar. Takala was a living album of images, all of them with Calliope in them. She had brought back ancient details of his sister. Even now, Striker remembered their last hurtful words to each other. Calliope hadn’t liked Raithe and his friends, and she’d warned Striker to keep his distance. Striker had laughed it off. His little sister couldn’t possibly be a better judge of character than himself. After all, he was the older brother. He had been so arrogant and blind. He wished he had listened to her, but he’d fallen under Raithe’s spell.
It had started with all-night orgies in Rome’s highest circles, all of Raithe’s vampire concubines Striker had wanted. Slowly he was lured into their bloodlust hell. He wished he had listened to Calliope. She and his parents wouldn’t have been killed. No matter how hard he tried, he knew he would carry that guilt for all eternity. In truth, when he was near Takala it worsened. So why did he feel so drawn to her? As if by being near her he was somehow finding redemption from the largest mistake he’d ever made in his life. None of it made sense. He should feel the opposite, shouldn’t he?
It might just be the craving for the taste of Takala’s blood that had awakened in him a sleeping monster, one he thought he had conquered. He’d had no choice but to drink her blood in the warehouse. If he could have refused, he would have. He could feel the blood bond it created, feel her heart beating inside his own veins, feel her essence entwined with his. The only thing he couldn’t feel were her emotions, and the only explanation he could fathom was that her white magic had blocked them. Still, she would remain a part of him until he let her go.
He should let her go, but he couldn’t. The need within him to keep her close was like a virus inside him. He had tried to wipe those lurid sensations from his memory, but he knew he couldn’t clean Takala from his system. She was an ache in his heart, a thorn in his heel.
He wished she felt the blood connection, but he was powerful enough to make sure she didn’t know about it. No, this was his agony alone.
He pulled out the vial of earth, suspended around his neck with a gold chain. He had kept it for eons. He held it up to the ceiling florescent light, examining it with loathing. He was so tired of not feeling like a vampire or a human, caught in a purgatory he had made for himself….
The screen near his desk pinged, and Katalinga’s face appeared.
It drew his thoughts from the one thing he wanted: Takala. He noticed Katalinga was out of breath, and a few bloodstains dotted her leather jacket. She stood in what looked like a run-down room with peeling and ripped brown wallpaper. A dim lightbulb threw a yellow haze over the area. He could hear and see Brawn behind her, giving orders to cleaners. They were working on the memories of several large human thugs that looked beaten, bloodied and bruised. Striker had thought of breaking up the team of Brawn and Katalinga, but had changed his mind. They worked well together, despite the sexual attraction. And he was betting Brawn’s feelings were more involved than Katalinga’s. After being with Takala, he found himself oddly tolerant of anything having to do with affection. The thought made him grimace at the phone as he said, “Yes.”
“Just wanted to let you know, mission accomplished.” Katalinga’s brows narrowed as she surveyed him.
She must have noticed his lack of attention to his appearance. In fact he looked like hell warmed over. He had on a pair of old worn chinos and a wrinkled chambray blue shirt. He hadn’t bothered to pull his hair back before he left his townhouse, and it straggled around his shoulders. His sleep had been broken or nonexistent for days, an insatiable desire for Takala, slowly, by degrees, taking over his life.
“Well done,” Striker said. As punishment for losing Takala to the bats, he had put Katalinga in charge of destroying the last of Raithe’s murder rings at a house in Prague. He couldn’t have chosen a better agent to handle it.
“We freed all the victims, and the cleaners are finishing up.”
“No casualties?”
“None. We got here before a new shipment of teens left.”
“They are home safe?” he asked.
“Yes.”
Striker wondered how long they would be safe in the world. At least the highest bidder wouldn’t be draining their life away tonight. “Fine job,” he said. “Don’t leave anything out of your report.”
“I won’t, sir.”
“Goodnight.” The phone went blank.
He felt the walls getting smaller and smaller and headed for the door. He felt antsy, his senses highly responsive, the scents of humans filling him. Takala’s steady heartbeat pounded in his head.
He found himself walking, walking, the cool night air doing little to clear his mind. There was a battle going on inside him, and he was determined to win.
He heard a man and woman arguing even before he saw them. They stood in front of a bar called Fat Louie’s. The man was slapping the woman while she screamed for help. People just walked past them, gawking but not helping.
In a blink, Striker grabbed the guy and threw him against a building.
He made a move toward Striker, but Striker’s voice stopped him. “You don’t want to do that. Go home and sleep it off.”
When the guy turned and strode down the sidewalk, the woman flung herself at Striker, thanking him. “Oh, jeez, thank you so much. My boyfriend would have killed me. I’m telling you, I’d be dead. He didn’t want to break up. You’re my hero.”
“I doubt that.” Striker noticed she was about thirty, short, blonde, and smelled of cigarettes and stale, greasy French fries. Her cheek was bruised, and a stream of blood ran down her lip.
The smell. So wet and fresh. He could sense the warmth of fresh arterial blood. Something snapped. Striker reacted without thinking. He grabbed her, glamoured her, and led her into the closest alley.
She was dazed, ready to let him do what he wanted.
He grabbed her, felt the heat of her human body next to his. His fangs snapped out. He bent toward her jugular….
Right before his lips touched her skin, a vision of Takala’s beautiful face flashed before his eyes. He paused, his body trembling uncontrollably, gripping the woman by her upper arms. “Nooooo!” He heard the scream in his own mind. What was he doing?
He stepped back from the woman and handed her a twenty dollar bill. “Get a cab home,” he said.
She still looked up at him, wide-eyed, as if expecting more from him.
“Go,” he demanded.
She walked slowly down the alley, head down, clutching the twenty in her fist, and disappeared.
Striker fell back against a dirty Dumpster, the smell of rotting food, filth and rat feces surrounding him. Seemed fitting to find himself here. This wasn’t the lowest point in his life; that had been when he had discovered that Raithe had killed his family. But this came close. He had mistakenly believed it was blood he craved. Now he realized he had evolved beyond that.
It was Takala he wanted. A woman who could make Atlas look like a wimp. The bravest woman he’d ever known, and that was saying something, because he had known thousands of women, vampire and human alike. Not one of them had been strong enough to resist his powers of suggestion, nor irritated him as much as Takala Rainwater.
He smiled, thinking of how she had made him believe he could force his will on her. Little minx with her bag of tricks. But he admired her pluck. She tackled the snake shifter to save his life and dove into the fray with the hover demons at the airport without a care for her own life. And she had given him strength at the warehouse by sharing her blood with him. She was a beautiful, sexy enigma. Tough as nails on the outside, but insecure and unsure of herself on the inside. There wasn’t anything she wouldn’t do for someone she loved. She was a woman by which he would measure all females. He’d never met a woman like her, nor one who came close to her beauty on the outside and inside. She had opened him up, peeled back layers of dead skin from his heart. He felt alive again just by having spent a few days with her. What would a lifetime with her feel like?
Chapter 25
Takala made a face at Meikoda and said, “Tell Akando I’m not here.”
“He knows you are here. He can see your car.”
“Tell him I’m sick.”
“It is not like you to be a coward, Takala. You have unfinished business with him. Finish it.” Meikoda gave her a long, disapproving look, then left her alone at the door.
Takala fought her disappointment that it wasn’t Striker at the door. She straightened her spine, threw back her shoulders, summoned her courage. She could do this. She flung open the door and stared at him. Akando stood there in all his handsome, male-model glory, tight jeans hugging his muscular thighs, long brown hair pulled back in a braid down his back, that wicked smile that could charm the panties off a woman in seconds. The porch light cast a bronze-yellow glow over his skin that added to his machismo. She found herself gasping a little at his beauty.
It was safer to keep him outside, so she stepped out the screen door and onto the porch.
“Hello.” She folded her arms over her chest.
Akando reached for her, but Takala dodged his hands.
The smile turned into a guarded frown as he said, “We can’t touch now?”
“No.”
“Can’t come in, either?”
“We spent two days cleaning the house. Grandmother wouldn’t approve.” Well, tiny fib there. But what was the harm in that?
His dark gaze drank her in. “Takala, give me another chance. That’s all I’m asking.”
She noticed a needy look in his eyes that she had seen in her very own eyes countless times, in situations just like this one, hoping that a man wasn’t about to dump her. The sweaty palms, fists clenched, that sick, angst-ridden look swirling in his expression. The signs were all there. She actually felt sorry for him and gave him a polite little grin. “Please don’t make this harder than it is. Let’s just part as friends.”
“‘Part as friends.’ That’s something to say to me. Good grief, we’ve been friends forever. You’ve turned into a cold woman, Takala.”
The old Takala might have knocked him off the porch, but now she only said, “I’m not cold. I just don’t need a man in my life to complete me.”
“Stop with the Oprah crap.”
“It’s not crap. I mean it. If I find love, okay. And if I don’t, so be it. But I don’t need a man to make me feel secure.” She waved her hands in a dismissive gesture and wondered if she was being entirely honest. If this was another man, say a tall, sexy, blond vampire who was older than Methuselah and dressed like an Armani model and tossed orders at her that she disregarded and made her insides melt when she was near him, she might be changing her tune. She wished Striker was standing before her—no, what was she thinking? He had hurt her. At least he’d been honest about how he felt about her, not like the jerk standing before her, waffling back and forth like a mouse unsure about coming out of his hole. That’s what she had been dating. Mice!
Akando grabbed her hand. “You could find love with me again.”
“We’ve been through all this. The cheating thing isn’t going away. You don’t love me. You just think you do right now because I don’t want you.”
“That’s not—”
“That’s it and you know it. It’s all about the chase with you, Akando. You’re still in love with Fala, anyway. You’ll always be in love with my sister.” She tossed the words out, and they hung between them like a heavy cloud. Finally, she had spoken the truth, something she had forced to the back of her mind because she’d had such a crush on him. Getting it out felt like a yoke being lifted from her shoulders.
He looked pensively off into the woods behind her grandmother’s rancher, his jaw hardening as he ground his teeth. A huge full moon hung over the trees, bright as a torch in the night sky.
At his silence, she said, “Don’t worry, you’ll get over her when you meet the right girl. I’m just not her.”
He glanced at her, his expression dejected, tears shimmering in his eyes. He was finally dealing with the truth, too. “I had hoped you would be,” he said, his voice low and sexy as he grasped her hand.
“We both did, but we were fooling ourselves.”
“You’ve changed, Takala. Different somehow. Wiser, more mature.”
She knew she had Striker to thank for clearing her head on what she wanted from men and what she needed from them. Two different things.
“Thanks.” Takala felt his sweaty palms and pulled her hand back. “Sorry, I have to go. My family will be here any moment.”
“So your mom’s really back?”
“Yes.”
“Let me know how she’s doing, will you?”
“Sure.”
Akando turned, and she watched him walk away, his form disappearing into the night. If Striker hadn’t opened her eyes, she might have run after Akando and nurtured a bad relationship, making it worse and lying to herself about Akando being in love with her. Now she could watch him walk away with only heartrending sympathy for him, because unrequited love stinks. She was the expert on it. Whoever came up with that saying, “It’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all,” probably had never loved someone and suffered the heartache.
“Touching.”
For a moment, Takala couldn’t tell if the sarcastic male voice came from inside her mind or out. Then she felt a familiar dark overpowering presence behind her, and her heart lurched.
Chapter 26
“This is so not fair. You need a bell around your neck,” she teased while she breathed in the sight of him.
His hair was loose, straight around his shoulders. He had that five o’clock shadow on his face and chin. He wasn’t wearing his usual suit. God forbid, no tie, and a wrinkled cotton shirt. Something was definitely wrong with this picture, but he was still so handsome it hurt her eyes to look at him. She gazed down at the steps.
“Then I wouldn’t be able to scare defenseless women,” he said, a definite warmth in his voice that she’d never heard before. He seemed relaxed, his guard down.
“I’m not defenseless.” She shot him one of her proud and defiant looks.
“How well I know that.” He stared at her, some nameless emotion swimming in the purple depths of his eyes. He pulled a small box of imported Belgian chocolates from his pocket and tried to hand them to her. “Do these do anything in the way of softening you?”
“You can’t buy me with food.”
“My mistake.” His jaw muscles clenched until tension pulled along his shoulders, straightened his spine. For a brief flash, he looked almost wounded. He blinked once; then the walls went up again and his poker face was back in place. He shoved the chocolates back in his pocket.
As much as Takala wanted to throw her arms around his neck, she kept her distance. Why was he here anyway? She felt his emotions rolling around her head, but they were all jumbled. She wouldn’t let herself hope he was here to sweep her off her feet. That was the old Takala thinking.
“So—” she forced an aloof note into her voice “—you’re finally getting around to saying goodbye?”
“I am sorry about that. I had to personally oversee the destruction of Raithe’s businesses.”
“Make the world a safer place,” she finished for him. She couldn’t endure the weight of his dark eyes, and she stared down at the toes of her high heels.
“Yes.” The one word seemed to separate them a mile apart.
“You’ve gotten a new laid-back look.” She pointed to his clothes.
“It appears so.” He frowned down at the shirt.
“Kind of like it. You’re not all starched up.”
Silence built be
tween them, and it pulsed against her.
After a contemplative moment, he said, “I don’t know who that man was.”
The painfully adrift tone in his voice went right to her heart and squeezed it. He sounded so sad, and she wanted to make the sadness go away, but she wasn’t certain if he wanted that or not, so she said nothing.
After a moment, he said, “Who was that man you were talking to?”
Was that jealousy beneath his voice? “Didn’t you hear everything with that Superman hearing of yours?”
“Caught the tail end of the conversation.”
“It was Akando.”
An almost chilling smile slowly inched across his lips. “Are you two back together again?”
The old Takala would have told him the truth. The new one was a little more leery about putting her feelings out there, so she tested the waters by saying, “I don’t know.”
He fell silent and made a point of studying the moon.
She watched a vein throbbing in his neck, watched his fists tighten and loosen. He seemed uncomfortable, on edge.
When Takala couldn’t stand the pressure of the silence any longer she said, “I’d appreciate it if you would stop getting into my head.”
“What?” A blond eyebrow cocked in surprise.
“You heard me. Something weird is going on with both of us. I know it comes from sharing my blood with you. You have to make it stop.”
“You can feel my emotions?”
“Yes, and it’s annoying, let me tell you.”
“I don’t see how that’s possible. I blocked them from you.”
“Well, maybe you can’t, and I’d appreciate you severing the connection.” There. She’d put him on the fence. He’d have to fall one way or the other, and she’d know how he felt about her.
