Bad Boys of the Night: Eight Sizzling Paranormal Romances: Paranormal Romance Boxed Set

by Jennifer Ashley

  A glimmer of heat broke through the ice in his gaze, warming the blue until it burned, a mirror of the inferno inside her that threatened to blaze out of control as she waited to see what he would do.

  She had only meant to stop him from attacking the human, but now she wanted so much more than that.

  She wanted him to kiss her.

  Seconds drifted by, the distant chatter of the crowd and misty rain going unnoticed by her. She couldn’t have torn her focus away from Tor if a bomb had gone off.

  Tor didn’t seem to have that problem.

  He stepped back and released her, his gaze falling to his boots. He stood there for a moment, a handful of seconds in which Eve fought to conceal her disappointment and hurt, and the temptation to kiss him instead.

  He didn’t give her the chance. He took hold of her wrist and pulled her through the crowd, his pace quicker now, his stride determined as the church loomed ahead of them. She stumbled along behind him and cursed herself for being weak around him, letting him dictate how everything should be and being unsure of herself. She was stronger than that.

  She pulled her arm free of his bruising grip and ignored the low growl that curled from him. She was perfectly capable of walking to the church without his assistance. She was through letting him order her around. This was her revenge mission and she was going to be the one in charge. Tor could carry out her orders. He could damn well do as she said for a change.

  Eve weaved her way through the throng and broke out into a clearing close to the church. She tracked Adam’s scent, using it as a guide to find what he had done with the vampire he had attacked. The trail ended at a small wooden door in the side of the church.

  She pointed to it. “Open it.”

  Tor frowned at her but did as instructed. He scanned their surroundings, ensuring no one was watching, and then carefully opened the door. He entered first and held the door for her. His chivalry melted a fraction of her anger and it was hard to stoke it back up again, especially when he closed the door and she went to venture deeper into the church.

  He caught her arm in a gentle grip. “Wait. I’ll scout ahead, just in case they left someone behind or the vampire they brought in isn’t dead.”

  Eve considered protesting on principle but he was already moving into the darkness. She allowed her vampire side to emerge.

  Everything sharpened as her eyes changed and the darkness lifted, leaving the church looking as it would in daylight. She scanned the expansive cold stone room.

  Twin rows of pews followed the stone columns that supported the wooden roof. A lone candle flickered in front of one of the chapels, the weak light almost blinding while her eyes were changed. Light filtered through the stained glass panels from outside too and she stared at them, taking in all the colours. She couldn’t remember the last time she had been in a church.

  She looked off to her left, towards the dais and the curved end of the church. Tor crouched there.

  She risked his anger and walked down one line of pews and along the main aisle. Tor lifted his head as she approached, settling back on his haunches and revealing the man laying prone on the stone floor.

  Tor went back to inspecting the man. He lifted the vampire’s eyelids and she frowned, moving closer as she saw his eyes were completely black.

  “Tranquilized,” Tor explained and she crouched beside the man. “There’s a drug that can knock even our kind out for hours, even days at a time. Weaklings shouldn’t know about it.”

  He cursed, vile and low, in several languages, as if just one wasn’t enough to convey his anger and disgust in a satisfactory manner. Eve had the impression that this sedative was taboo among their kind, something a vampire with a shred of nobility wouldn’t consider using unless the situation was dire.

  Tor didn’t possess anything resembling a drug in his array of weapons.

  Eve wished he did. It would make taking out Adam a lot easier. She scratched that thought. Adam had used the drug on another vampire, and she didn’t want to be like him in even the smallest way.

  “I can’t see what they wanted with him. Why just knock a man out for a few hours?” Tor leaned back and rested his elbows on his knees, his black hooded sweatshirt blending with his jeans.

  Eve checked the unconscious vampire over. There were no wounds on his neck. She couldn’t even pinpoint where they had jabbed him to tranquilize him, but she suspected it would be on his back. Adam must have administered the dose when he had brushed against the man while his cohorts had been distracting him.

  She frowned at the man’s hands. One of the cuffs of his black shirt was undone and pulled back to reveal his wrist. There hadn’t been a struggle, so it couldn’t have happened by accident, and this man didn’t look like the sort who forgot to button a cuff. His clothing was impeccable, a fine black shirt paired with tailored trousers, and a very expensive looking long black wool coat.

  Eve tugged the sleeve on her side back even more. She kept going until she had reached his elbow and found a small dark dot on the inside of it.

  Tor reached across and inspected the puncture wound. “They took his blood.”

  He sounded as incredulous as he looked, and she shook her head as it dawned on her. He frowned at her, his blue eyes intense as he stared across the prone man’s body.

  “You know something. What’s going on here, Eve?”

  She couldn’t be sure, but she had a dreadful feeling that she knew exactly what Adam was up to, why the other weaklings were working for him, and why they had left this vampire alive.

  She held Tor’s gaze as the gravity of what they had discovered hit her. “It’s Midnight.”

  His frown hardened. “What’s Midnight?”

  Eve lowered her gaze to the wound in the man’s arm, one that could only have been caused by a needle and she knew had nothing to do with drugging him.

  “They took his blood.” She fingered the mark, causing a dark bead to break to the surface and tremble there. “Just before I was born, weakling vampires attempted to turn humans into a more powerful form of weakling. They mixed weakling blood with some from a pureblood vampire, and then added a lethal dose of poison that would take time to kill whoever drank the cocktail.”

  She met Tor’s gaze again.

  “They were going to put it into whisky shots at a Halloween party at Oneiric’s club in England. They were going to kill everyone and they would have awoken as vampires.”

  Tor swore under his breath. “Mass turning?”

  She nodded. “A new, stronger breed of weakling, ones able to stand against the purebloods but also on their side.”

  “How do you know this when my family doesn’t?” His blue eyes held a shadow, a flutter of darkness in their depths. He had wanted to ask how Oneiric had known and had failed to tell his bloodline.

  Oneiric made no secret of his lack of obedience to their bloodline. He had turned against them shortly before she had been born, after the Midnight incident. He had felt he had no reason to pledge allegiance to a bloodline who had failed him.

  “Section Seven and Oneiric intervened and put an end to it before the final stage of the plan could happen. The theory was created by a doctor in our ranks, a man who had desired to enhance our hunters with vampire genes, increasing their strength and abilities. He turned vampire and continued his research, and perfected it.” She paused to check on the man, wondering if he was going to wake halfway through their conversation and attack them. Tor seemed at ease and she took her cue from him, relaxing again, certain that Tor wouldn’t allow her to remain near the man if he thought he was a danger to her. “He had drawn too much attention to himself though. They tried blood from many sources, capturing pureblood vampires of varying strength and also kidnapping humans to use as guinea pigs. I read about it once, years ago, when I hacked into a classified file while looking for something else.”

  “What were you looking for?” Tor stood and towered over her, an immense shadow in the strange twilight of her height
ened vision.

  “My mother.”

  She got to her feet and stared down at the vampire, avoiding Tor’s inquisitive gaze. She didn’t want to talk about it. She wasn’t ready yet. When she had found her mother’s file and read about the documented genetic alteration she had ordered on her unborn children, her and Lilith, she should have known that her vampire genes had run deeper than they had ever suspected. She shouldn't have been surprised to come back from the dead.

  “Eve?” Tor reached for her and she backed off a step, afraid that if he touched her she wouldn’t be strong enough to resist stepping into his arms and succumbing to the rising tide of her memories and emotions. She was tired of being weak.

  “Can we get out of here?” She kept her eyes locked on the man.

  “Sure,” Tor said and began walking towards the small side door.

  Eve followed in silence, battling the memory of how she had felt upon reading her mother’s file and then her own. The discovery that her mother’s love for Oneiric and belief that he was dead had paved the way for the enhanced hunters Section Seven now employed as weapons against the purebloods, the very species whose blood was responsible for their increased abilities, had crushed her and left her in a sort of daze, drowning in her thoughts.

  Lilith had been concerned about her, had pampered her and believed she was sick or coming down with a bad bug. Eve hadn’t had the heart to tell her sister what she had uncovered. It had shaken her. She couldn’t have imagined what the same knowledge would have done to her sister. Lilith had always been the softer one, more sensitive about the fact they hadn’t known their parents and were alone in the world.

  Tor held the door for her again and Eve forced her true nature away when she hit the streets, her eyes switching back to their normal colour and the world dulling around her. The cool damp air now felt like bliss on her skin, washing away the bad memories and the pain. She heard the door close behind her and then Tor was beside her, silent and steady, calm and unfazed by what was happening. Her solid anchor in the midst of a deadly storm.

  “Adam must have taken the files from Section Seven before being turned by the weaklings he made a deal with.” She closed her eyes and tipped her head back, tuning out everything but the rain and Tor, narrowing her world down to a more manageable level, one she could handle right now. “They were supposed to kill me but because of Oneiric’s DNA, I became a vampire upon death, and a pureblood at that.”

  “Oneiric’s DNA?” Tor whispered, confusion lacing his words.

  She nodded. “I’m not enhanced, Tor. Oneiric, in a way, is my father. My mother fell in love with him and when she thought he was dead, she used the research she had found, had one of her eggs fertilized, and used a vial of his blood to tamper with our DNA. She wanted us to share Oneiric’s genes. I think she wanted something of him, and something to remember him by.”

  Eve sighed and wondered if she would have done such a thing had she been in her mother’s shoes.

  “And because of her tampering, you and Lilith were born with vampire genes, and when you died, your immortality triggered and you came back as a Vehemens, like Oneiric.” Tor’s soft voice wrapped around her, comforting her and leaving her feeling that he understood everything now, but that it hadn’t changed how he felt about her, whatever that was. “Now Adam wants you dead. He wants to remove any danger of you warning the pure bloodlines.”

  She nodded, hating the bastard even more. He had betrayed her, killed her, and now he wanted to kill her again. Not if she killed him first. She opened her eyes and dropped her chin, bringing her focus down to Tor.

  “We need to tell them. There has to be a way to stop Adam from using the Midnight experiment data. We need to warn Oneiric too. His name wasn’t in the file I read… I only figured out he had been the one to help my mother and Section Seven because of the other files I read, the ones about her and how me and Lilith came to be… but I’m worried Adam knows he was involved and that they attacked the Paris branch of One to kill Oneiric, and not me.”

  Tor scanned the area, his eyes flitting from one person to the next, assessing everyone and everything. He moved closer to her, his large body shielding her from the rain that was steadily growing heavier.

  “We need to get you to the Vehemens mansion outside the city. You’ll be safe there. We can make contact with Lincoln and inform him of what we’ve discovered.” Tor wrapped his fingers around her right upper arm and drew her against him, until the world fell away again and he filled all of her senses.

  “And Oneiric. We need to tell Oneiric too.”

  Tor nodded. “First, we need to get out of here. You up for a fight?”

  Eve tensed and quickly searched her surroundings, reaching out with her senses in all directions to locate the danger Tor must have detected.

  Adam’s scent drifted on the cold breeze.

  Loud banter rose above the noise of the crowd, a drunken ruckus designed to make the humans look in the other direction.

  A chill skated down her spine.

  They were coming back.

  CHAPTER 8

  Tor grabbed Eve’s arm and tried to pull her away. She remained rooted to the spot, her eyes fixed in the direction of the weaklings. This wasn’t the time for her to lose focus. Right now, they had the advantage and he meant to keep it. He couldn’t allow Adam to realise they were still alive.

  He dragged Eve into his arms, intending to sling her over his shoulder and hoof it away from the church, using the back streets to avoid Adam. He was about to swing her up when movement nearby caught his attention. Two weaklings, lurking in the shadow of the large tree. There were more involved in this plot to steal blood from his kind than he had believed.

  Tor shoved Eve behind him and reached back for his gun at the same time, drawing the weapon from the waistband of his jeans. He squeezed off a round, nailing one of the weaklings in the side of his head, sending him crashing to the ground. The humans nearby screamed and the crowd broke apart, pandemonium that he used to his advantage. He needed to get Eve away from the area before Adam spotted her.

  He fired on the other weakling but the man was on to him and quickly shifted behind the thick trunk of the tree. The bullet ripped into the wood, spraying splinters and leaving a pale gash. Tor growled and pulled Eve with him, going after the vampire before he could warn the others. He rounded the tree, released Eve and blocked the fist that flew at him from the shadows.

  The man swung again, aiming higher this time. Tor grabbed his fist and twisted it, snapping the vampire’s arm, and drove the butt of his gun hard into his temple. The man staggered right.

  Tor struck again, harder this time, and a satisfying crack sounded as the man’s skull fractured. The vampire snarled and threw a series of wild blows, blood streaming down the side of his face. Tor blocked each strike, slapping the man’s hands aside, ensuring they never touched him. He shoved his gun down the back of his jeans, swept behind the man, grabbed both sides of his head and twisted hard, snapping his neck.

  He let the body drop to the floor and went to deal with the one with the gunshot wound.

  Eve screamed.

  Tor’s heart lurched and his gaze shot to her.

  She stood in the middle of the square in front of the church, desperately fighting off two more weaklings.

  And Adam.

  Tor cursed.

  Eve lashed out with her twin knives, catching one of the vampires across his upper arm and chest. The male growled and fell back, clutching at the wound. Blood pumped from between his fingers and stained the front of his pale jacket.

  The second vampire attacked, coming up behind Eve.

  Tor growled and threw himself at the man, taking him down and landing on top of him. The vampire twisted and elbowed Tor in the side of the head, rattling his brain. He growled and swiped at the vampire with his claws, dragging them across his left cheek and down his neck.

  A muffled grunt captured his attention again, distracting him as his gaze sought E
ve.

  She faced off against Adam, clutching her one remaining blade.

  Adam brandished the other.

  The larger male launched himself at Eve and she was immediately on the defensive, desperately blocking each strike of the knife. The scent of her blood permeated the cold damp air and Tor growled.

  Adam landed a hard blow on her cheek, sending her careening sideways towards the church. She growled, low and feral, and turned on him.

  Tor reached back for his gun and grunted as the man beneath him kneed him in the ribs, hard enough to crack at least one. He pushed himself up, grasping the man’s throat and pinning him to the flagstones with his full bodyweight, crushing his windpipe. The weakling choked and clawed at his hands, but Tor ignored the pain and punched him hard, battering the male until his movements weakened and he eventually fell still.

  Eve scooted past him, strafing backwards to avoid Adam’s blows, heading towards the recess between the church and the taller trees. She glanced at him and Tor shoved to his feet, preparing to launch himself at Adam when he passed. The bastard vampire shifted his focus to him instead, coming at him with Eve’s knife, thrusting and slashing.

  As if such a paltry weapon would kill him.

  Tor spread his feet shoulder width apart and hunkered down to spring at Adam and disarm him.

  Eve flew into the fray before the man could reach him, her knife slamming to the hilt in his shoulder. Blood burst across her hand and she snarled, flashing fangs, as she withdrew the blade to land another blow.

  She didn’t get the chance.

  Adam spun low, twirled the blade in his hand so the end of the hilt was nearest to his thumb, and stabbed it into the inside of her right thigh. He dragged the blade down several inches and Eve’s agonized cry ripped at Tor as she threw her head back, her face a mask of pain and horror.

  Tor launched himself at Adam, slammed into him and knocked him away from Eve. She hit the pavement, whimpering as she clutched at her leg. Adam landed a solid punch on his jaw as Tor briefly checked on her and broke free of his grip.