Bond with Me

by Anne Marsh

  Taking the Plunge

  “You let me in,” he promised, “and I’ll make it good. I’ll give you whatever you want, dushka. No questions. No explanations.” He trailed the sword-roughened pads of his fingers down the bare skin of her arm and leaned forward. The hair she’d unbound slid around them, sealing them into a dark, decadent world of pleasure. The spicy scent of male and sex surrounded them.

  “For a price,” she said, desperate to shake off his erotic spell.

  “Everything has its price, dushka,” Brends whispered against her ear.

  She needed this. She needed him. She wasn’t going to find her cousin on her own, not before the killer did. Brends, on the other hand, could. She wished she wasn’t so attracted to him. If they bonded, he’d have an inside track straight into her head. He’d be able to connect to her. Communicate with her.

  “And?” Her voice sounded dry. As if her throat was closing up.

  “If the killer were to come for you,” he eyed her closely. “I’d know. I’d be right there.”

  “You want to use me as bait.”

  To give him credit, he didn’t hesitate. He gave her the truth, although she supposed it only helped his cause. “Yes.”

  She might be able to help stop this. And stopping this was the right thing to do. Before she could rethink her decision, she said it. “Yes. Bond with me, Brends.”

  Bond With Me

  Anne Marsh

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Taking the Plunge

  Title Page

  The Fallen

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Acknowledgments

  Praise for Anne Marsh

  Other books by Anne Marsh:

  Copyright

  The Fallen

  The first rebellion that disturbed the Heavens was unthinkable. The rebels were Dominions, guardians and angel warriors bred to defend the Heavens’ throne. To die for it. And yet the other angel castes handed the archangel Michael incontrovertible proof that the grisly killings sweeping through the Heavens were the work of these same Dominions.

  When the killings continued, Michael knew that he must make an example of the rebels and their leaders. The rebels undermined his authority, and worse, his lieutenants whispered, the rebels accused Michael of the very killings of which the Dominions themselves stood convicted. Nothing like this had ever disturbed the perfect fabric of Michael’s Heavens.

  What the archangel devised then was the cruelest punishment imaginable. He ordered the rebels stripped of souls and wings and cast out of the Heavens. The Fallen were thrown down to Earth, and to make sure that they learned their lesson, Michael cursed each to live as a Goblin, half man and half beast, one half eternally at war with the other. Whenever the man’s control slipped, the beast would emerge, a predator driven to devour human souls to feed the man’s need for the soul he had lost. Michael held out just one hope of salvation: if one of the Fallen found his soul mate, the one female who could redeem him and teach him love and light and peace, that Fallen would regain his wings, his soul and the Heavens as soon as he truly knew what it meant to love.

  Three thousand years later, in the year 2090, no one had ever reascended, and the Fallen no longer believed in the promise of soul mates.

  One

  As far as the human residents of M City were concerned, G2’s was one damn sexy club, the sort of place you visited when you were in the money and feeling very, very lucky. You put on your best dancing clothes, flashed whatever cash you had and got ready to bargain very, very hard. Because only the select few were ever invited inside.

  Prowling past the queue of waiting humans, Brends Duranov scented hope, anticipation and outright desperation seeping from the waiting mob of would-be revelers. Cross that plush velvet line, take the first step inside the club, and who knew what could happen? Humans believed that his Goblin ability to make a wish come true was worth any price.

  Brends knew better.

  The hot interest, the even headier cocktail of their individual souls, teased his inner addict. What he wanted—what he needed—was lined up and waiting for him. All he had to do was stretch out a hand and choose. Pick a female and make her his dark offer: bond with him, swear to serve his every desire, and receive one favor. She could name anything at all and he’d deliver. All she had to do was serve him, in bed and out, letting him drink of her soul through their bond. He’d taste all the light and goodness she had stored inside her soul, until she was drained and lifeless—or insane.

  The fantasy was that in serving him, they served themselves.

  That’s what those females standing on the other side of the paltry velvet rope were really waiting for. That was the chance for which they’d come, why they’d put on their four-inch heels and were staring at him with those needy eyes.

  He scanned the crowd, looking for one human in particular. She’d stalked him at the club for the last three nights. Her honey-and-musk scent was just as much of a turn-on as the thought of her long, supple fingers stroking his cock. He could feel himself hardening even now.

  But the woman was nowhere to be found. And suddenly he had no appetite for anyone else. He wasn’t bonding with anyone. Not tonight.

  She didn’t want him.

  “My liege?” The bouncer closest to the door looked startled at the pause in Brends’s long, sure prowl toward the front doors of G2’s. He’d never stopped before. The women waiting in line pushed closer to the rope.

  He growled something that must have passed for a greeting, because the bouncer held the door open so he could pass through it. He jabbed the elevator button almost hard enough to punch through the brass panel, cursing silently. It was just as well the unknown female had wised up and left his club the hell alone. He couldn’t afford to make the same mistake twice.

  When he stepped out of the private elevator, letting the doors glide smoothly shut at his back, the thumping beat of prog music hit him like a blast between the eyes. He quickly moved to the quieter VIP section and the corner table reserved solely for his use. Tonight someone was there waiting: the male who’d called him here. His sire.

  Zer was a soldier first and foremost, a tall, broad-shouldered shadow whom humans gave a wide berth. No one crossed Zer. A band of black tattoos circled his thick wrists, and his jet-black hair was bound back in a long queue. Even at rest, he looked ready to pounce. Zer never let down his guard, never relaxed. He didn’t believe in mercy. Probably had never received any himself, if the nicks and scars on his face were any indication. He nodded a curt greeting in Brends’s direction. His movements held the lethal grace of a snake, a cobra poised to strike.

  “You’ve seen the newspapers?” Zer tossed the question out casually, as if he and Brends had been parted for minutes rather than months. Rumor had it that Zer had been tracking down a rogue Goblin who didn’t want to be sent to the Preserves.

  Near-immortal, the longer a Goblin lived, the harder it became for him to ignore the raw hunger for emotions that constantly tormented him. The man survived by judiciously feeding that thirst by bonding with a willing human, but the beast locked away inside him was a predator who yearned to devour the very soul that sustained it. Sometimes, the beas
t overpowered the man, and other times, the man Changed for reasons of his own.

  When Michael pushed them out of the Heavens and down into the human world, he’d taken the time to rub a little salt into those wounds. Not only had he ripped off their wings, leaving a psychic wound that no amount of time could heal, but he’d stripped them of their softer emotions as well. Since they’d acted like beasts, he’d said, they could live like beasts. They’d experience hunger, pain, fear, rage, the keen desire to hunt and track and tear. He’d condemned them to a lifetime as feral predators—but with an inescapable hunger to be more. And the only way to get that “more” was vicariously. Bond with a human, and the Goblin could feel everything that human felt. Or rather, the Goblin preyed on the human’s emotions, drinking them down like a vampyr did blood. Sooner or later, the human had nothing left. Most of them went mad.

  Now the human papers had been reporting savage Goblin kills along the eastern edge of the empire, and public sentiment was turning against them. Any rogue Goblin who couldn’t control the Change and his thirst for human souls had to be dealt with. Quickly. No surprise their sire had taken on the job himself.

  A dancer shimmied dangerously close, the sweet, powdery scent of her perfume teasing Brends’s senses. She smelled good. Good enough to eat. Tonight’s hunger was worse than yesterday’s. The itch to drink deep from a human and savor the complex taste of a soul slowly changing from light to dark was almost impossible to ignore. Brends had spent centuries ignoring the thirst, however; he’d survive one more night.

  Still, the hunger put him on edge, made him tenser, terser than usual, so he wasn’t in the mood to exchange small talk with his sire.

  His sire had called. Brends had come. Now he just wanted the damn bastard to get on with his business so he could return to his office and see if she had decided to come after all.

  Hell, the plans he had to make her come. A small smile quirked the corner of his mouth. If she gave into her curiosity—and instinct told him she would—she wasn’t leaving his club until he’d had a good, long taste of the secrets she was keeping from him. What he hadn’t decided was where he would start. Would he tease her, tantalize her mouth, her neck, her breasts until she begged? Maybe he’d get straight to the point, spreading her creamy thighs and lapping at that juicy sex like she was dessert and he was a starving man.

  Zer coughed. “When you said you would meet with me here, I thought your terms included listening.”

  Hell. He forced his attention back to the male sprawled across from him, nodding his head in curt apology. A knowing glint appeared in his sire’s eyes. Zer knew how long Brends had held out, refusing to take a new bonded. Had to know just how hot and demanding the thirst riding him was.

  The bastard was enjoying every minute of it.

  “We’ve had a situation on our hands for months now. We’ve been losing human females, but now we’re losing brothers—and not just to the thirst, either. They’re going out to fight, and they’re not coming back. Someone has finally got his shit down and he’s killing our kind.” Zer steepled his fingers over his broad chest, trying and failing to look like the chance to kick some serious ass didn’t delight him. Shit, none of them liked losing their brothers—and Brends knew that they would exact every bit of revenge for their deaths that they could—but you didn’t survive by mourning your dead and hiding in the past. What you did was fight back. Hard.

  The pleasure faded from Zer’s face. “There was another death just this week. We’ve got a rogue with a taste for blood on our hands here. He keeps killing, and we won’t be able to keep it quiet.”

  “If the killer’s one of ours who’s gone rogue, we’ll take care of it. We always have. MVD knows that.” Not to mention that MVD, the human policing unit, wouldn’t be equipped to deal with a rogue. Last time they’d tried, there’d been a sudden number of openings in the unit. And not due to a rash of retirements, either. While Brends didn’t particularly care one way or another if the human population declined, this kind of mess had a bad habit of biting one on the ass if left unchecked.

  So he’d clean it up. Big deal. He’d tracked hundreds of rogues; this one wouldn’t be any different. It was bad policy to interfere with MVD investigations until you were damn sure of your facts. There was always fallout from stepping on MVD toes, even though Brends would have been perfectly content to settle matters by slitting a few throats. The solutions that had worked two thousand years ago were too brutal by today’s standards, so he’d give diplomacy a whirl first. See what he could dig up.

  “It could be another paranormal,” Zer suggested. The Goblins weren’t M City’s only paranormal residents—just the most visible. There were vampyrs, banshees and any number of other dark creatures.

  “But you don’t think so.”

  “This one’s killing for the pleasure of it.” Zer drummed his fingers on the table. “There’s a pattern here, but we’re not seeing it.”

  “So let’s review,” Brends suggested. “His first kill was a tourist. We always figured wrong place, wrong time, just another human who stuck her nose where it didn’t belong.”

  “Old M City family, that second one,” Zer observed. He traced a pattern around his fingers with the blade. One wrong move and he’d be missing a digit, but Zer never made a wrong move. A good male to have at your back, and that was why so many of them had followed him all those thousands of years ago. Why they still did. When you looked into Zer’s eyes, you believed. You had to.

  “She knew M City. She had a human husband.”

  “Stocks and bonds.” Zer nodded. He already knew this information. They both did, but some patterns weren’t obvious at first glance. Talking it through helped. “Loaded even by most standards. If she wasn’t tucked up in their town house, she was ferried around by limousine. Private planes.”

  Not bad protection for a human. Nowhere near as good as what Brends provided, but it should have been adequate. “And yet they found her three miles away from her bodyguards. In a negligee.”

  The press had had a field day with that one. The red negligee had been very expensive, very scanty and very bloody. Someone had ripped the socialite open from sternum to pelvis. Unfortunately, humans had been first to the scene for that one and the pictures had leaked before the Goblins could do anything.

  “Then two more.”

  “That we know about.”

  Brends turned the facts over in his head as he scrolled through the collection of gory crime-scene video playing on the slim silver vid-player Zer tossed him.

  “They’re all human.”

  Zer shot him a look. “Obviously.”

  “And all female.”

  “Yeah. Ages?” Zer had clearly been down this avenue himself. More than once.

  “Nothing too close—all within a ten- to twelve-year range of each other. No similarity in their appearance, either. Blondes, brunettes, hell, the bastard even threw a redhead in there.”

  The only obvious similarity was in the coroner’s report: the same blade had been used to gut the women. The coroner had noted the distinctive edge.

  “What about the weapon? Can we trace that?”

  They could try, but M City was ass deep in illegal contraband. Finding one knife would be like looking for a needle in a haystack. More important was the kind of strength it had taken to pull an edge like that—hell, any edge—through a human body. The murderer had split those bodies clean open like a hunter gutting his kill. He’d severed bones. Then repeatedly stabbed the chest cavity.

  “Sick bastard.”

  “Yeah.” Brends poured amber-colored liquid into a glass. “So he’s probably one of ours. He’s got the blade. He’s got the strength. I’ll take care of it.”

  Two

  The throbbing beat of the club music jarred Mischka Baran straight down to her bones. G2’s wasn’t a place known for subtlety. An almost visible wave of sound bowed out of the club’s deceptively chic entrance, an aural onslaught that pushed against her skin and
crawled straight inside her mind.

  So what if she didn’t like the music? She wasn’t here to have fun, and if the mere thought of stepping through that doorway had her palms sweating and her heart racing, well, that was her secret, wasn’t it?

  The sheer quantity of gyrating human bodies crammed into the club let her disappear in seconds, despite the panic that almost had her hyperventilating. No, the real surprise was that G2’s was precisely the sort of place she’d expected. Rumor hadn’t exaggerated it at all. Reflected in the psychedelic panels set into the ceiling, the writhing crowd of dancers moved in rhythm to the pounding music. Some sort of computer-synthesized dance music. A DJ spun well above the crowd. Mischka slid up to one of the glass and chrome bars and eyed the approaching bartender.

  Probably human, she decided. Definitely not Goblin, based on what she’d learned from her research. He was neither tall enough nor brutal looking enough. Instead, his features were finely chiseled, a smooth, straight jawbone that was almost too pretty to be masculine. A looker, sure, but almost as certainly human. Paranormals had a certain stamp to them she’d learned to read. Their faces reminded her all too easily of the cruelty that frequently lay beneath their surfaces. The few she’d met in person had been all about murder and mayhem.

  Right. The sooner she had answers, the sooner she could turn tail and run. Whipping out her vid-player and an old-fashioned yellow pad, she ran her eyes down the list she’d made just so she couldn’t chicken out. Someone in this club had seen or heard of her cousin, Pelinor Arden, and all she had to do was find that someone. Logic suggested she start with the bartender.

  “Oranzh juice,” she ordered when the bartender cocked an eyebrow in her direction. Her budget might just stretch to a juice in a place like this, and without a drink of some sort in her hand, she could forget any hope of blending in with the crowd. Hell, she already felt overdressed. Her classy little black number stopped two inches above her knees, but a discreet assessment of the dancers warned her that was about six inches too far past her ass for this crowd. Everywhere she turned, skin was on display. Other eyes slid over her, assessing, dismissing her. She wasn’t competition for what they wanted.