by Mina Carter
A deep scent filtered through the closed door. Wild and male, it reminded her of dark forests and forbidden places. Her body ached with the need to run, to escape. To feel her heart pound and the dirt beneath her feet—
“Sure thing, boss. I’ll make sure it happens.”
Eva blinked, yanked back to reality by Frank’s voice. Shit, what had that all been about. She’d never had a smell affect her so strongly. Sucking in a deep breath as quietly as she could, she tried to calm her racing heart.
“Good. And make sure everything is in place for the exchange. I can’t stand the Earl at the best of times, so I want this done and him off our land as soon as possible.” He turned and walked away as he spoke, his voice receding at the same pace as his footsteps.
She sagged against the door, resting her forehead against the cool wood as all her senses extended, following the distant sounds of Alex and Frank’s conversation. Finally, a door opened and shut near the front of the manor and she heard the deep, throaty sound of Alex’s car as he drove away.
He was gone.
Opening her eyes, she looked down to find her fingertips buried into the wood of the door frame as though it had no more consistency than cheese. Fuck. She snatched her hand back and looked at the imprints. Perfect impressions of her nails marked the painted surface.
Shit. How the hell had she managed that? She didn’t need to add property damage to her list of werewolfy sins. Biting her lip, she tried to smooth them over, but it was no good. The wood was hard and immovable.
Realizing there was nothing she could do about it, she opened the door and checked the corridor before slipping out and heading to her room.
They couldn’t prove anything because she wasn’t a werewolf.
Right?
***
Eva had never been in the forest that surrounded the Kingwood family estate on her own. Not at night. Or during the full moon. Especially not during the full moon.
Oh no, she smiled to herself as she slipped out a side door and into the shadows of the garden. When she’d lived here, all the humans were locked up nice and tight during the full moon with a guard patrolling to ensure they didn’t leave. Wouldn’t want to tempt some poor schmuck of a lycan into biting them.
She shook her head and crouched in the deeper shadows by the rose bushes. They moved slightly when she brushed against them and she was enveloped by their sweet, heady scent. For a moment she was caught, transfixed by the fragrance wrapping her in its coils. They smelled amazing. How had she not noticed before how wonderful roses smelled? Like a complex symphony for her olfactory senses, the perfume cascaded over and through her, holding her in thrall before it ebbed away. Shaking herself, she took a deep breath and brought her attention back to the task in hand.
Alex was trading a vampire somewhere in the forest and she intended to be there to find out what the hell was going on. The possibility that he was trading the vampire for Davie still wouldn’t leave her.
She chewed on her lower lip. If that was the case, why hadn’t he told her? Perhaps he wasn’t… perhaps there was some other deal going on with the vampires. But, if that was true, why had he wanted her drugged?
Feigning feeling sick earlier, she’d managed to get a tray sent up to her room. The chicken soup and its accompanying sparkling water had been easy to ditch in the en suite. Her stomach had growled, complaining at her because the soup smelled so good, but she couldn’t risk eating or drinking anything Frank brought her. She didn’t know which he’d slipped the drugs into and she wasn’t taking any chances.
Besides, she had a real craving for steak recently which was weird. She was normally a chicken person, maybe lamb for a rare change. Not steak unless it was grilled to boot leather. But now she was craving steak, blood red and juicy.
Huh, she might not be a werewolf, but it seemed her appetite was. She should’ve figured her stomach would get in on the act. It usually did.
Crouched in her hiding place, she watched the house for movement. Most of the wolves had left earlier, alone or in pairs, until there were only a few left. Frank appeared to be the last to leave, cracking her bedroom door open a little to check on her. She’d pretended to be asleep, sprawled across the bed like she usually did.
He hadn’t entered the room, simply closed the door and shortly after the house had gone quiet. Her cue to get dressed in the darkest clothes she had and do her best ninja impression.
A rosebush hugging ninja, that was. She’d never get anywhere sitting here. Confident she hadn’t tripped any silent alarms, Eva made her way to the edge of the garden and slipped into the forest. There was no boundary wall to mark the separation between the garden and the wilderness beyond. For a manor house belonging to a werewolf family, there didn’t need to be…
She broke into a light jog. For all of three point four seconds before she remembered why she didn’t jog without wearing a sports bra with structural steel support. Slowing to a pace the girls would sustain without threatening to black her eye, she followed the path deeper into the forest.
Which then petered out…
Well, shit.
She stopped in the middle of the non-path and looked around. She tried her best to ignore her heart hammering against the inside of her ribs. The trees loomed threateningly and the darkness closed in.
“Nothing is going to happen,” she muttered to herself, clamping her eyes shut. “They can’t have just disappeared. Not even lycans can vanish into thin air.”
With her eyes closed, something strange happened. A slight breeze on her cheek pulled her to the left and without thinking, she turned that way. Opening her eyes revealed the path ahead, barely more than a parting of the undergrowth but a path nonetheless. She’d just needed to look at the problem a different way to find it.
A good lesson for life. She should put that on a mug.
Her footsteps hastened and she sped down the path. She didn’t know where she was going, not consciously, but something inside her did. Since it had more of an idea than she did and it beat freaking out and primal screaming, she got with the program and followed it.
That same instinct warned her to slow down as she reached a small rise, and by the time she neared the top, she was on her hands and knees, her belly near the ground. Not a moment too soon either.
She peeked over the top and found herself looking down into a clearing. Obviously well used, it had logs and boulders set around a central ring like seats, all occupied by lycans, some in human form and some not.
Her breath caught on a gasp and she started to duck into her hiding place before she realized they weren’t looking at her. In fact, no one had even noticed she was there. Instead, all their attention was on the center of the clearing and the two men who stood there.
Alex she recognized and her heart leaped, body instantly feeling the pull toward him. She reminded herself he wasn’t hers, not anymore… if he ever had been to start with. She forced her attention to the other man and her breathing hitched.
The snarl rose again in the back of her throat as everything within her rejected the sight of the man standing in front of Alex. Tall, tanned, and blond, he looked the archetype rich-boy jock, but he wasn’t.
Everything about him was fake, she could see it in the way he moved… like something that was playing human, but wasn’t anything near. Admittedly, he was good at it, but some of his movements were just too fluid and controlled.
Humans didn’t move like that. They were an uncoordinated mess, a jumble of body parts under the control of an erratic brain that looped commands together and somehow got all the bones, muscles, and sinews moving together at roughly the same time.
Vampire.
The snarl rumbled in the back of her throat, unheard over the distance. She watched as two lycans dragged in a hooded figure, whipping the bag off his head to reveal another vampire. He looked a little worse for wear, but she couldn’t find it in her heart to feel sorry for him.
These assholes threatened to kill Dav
ie. For all she knew they had, unless…
The blond vampire took one look at the lycan’s vampire prisoner and nodded. Two men behind him, also vampires from the way their eyes and fingernails glittered a bit too much in the moonlight, shoved a figure forward. He stumbled, going to hands and knees in the dirt in front of Alex.
Eva caught her breath, something familiar about the boy catching her attention. Then he looked up and she was on her feet, racing down the slope between the seated lycans to throw her arms around his neck.
“Davie! Oh my god, Davie. You’re alive!”
Chapter Four
Like lycans, vampires had rules and a command structure. Unlike lycans, they ran in packs and like pixies, inhabited the underworld of the city. They stuck to back alleys and bars no one went into alone. Not if they planned to be breathing by the end of the night. If there was anything illegal going on, be it drugs, vice, murder, or any combination of the three. All controlled in some way or another by their leader, the Earl.
Given that they were all pathological liars with homicidal tendencies at the best of times, the Vampire Earl was a person most people avoided like the bubonic plague. And with good reason. Tall, blond, and with the kind of looks that had both men and women falling at his feet, Zane was not as wholesome as he looked.
Ruthless, single-minded, and vicious, he was spoken about on the backstreets with the same kind of awe Veyr was in more civilized circles. Alex had cooperated in a few… business deals with him. As few as he could get away with because the guy definitely had more than a few screws loose.
Word on the street said he was the bastard love child of a vampire and a captured valkyrie. Which was utter bullshit as far as Alex was concerned. Valkyries weren’t known to be cuddly. They’d sooner tear out a man’s throat just for standing in the way. And that was human males… so something as close to dead as a vampire? They’d eviscerate it on the spot, not get into bed with it.
No, the only way a vamp could get a child on a valkyrie was if she was near dead. And what sort of life would such a half-breed have? A child whose two halves were in constant opposition. Half valkyrie, a creature born to dispatch the dead to the afterlife, and half vampire, a creature essentially dead. It would be in permanent agony.
Which explained a lot about Zane.
Which made the fact he was in bed with the guy now really not a good idea. Half-breeds were inherently unstable. There was no way around it. Zane had something Alex wanted, so he had no choice but to play the vampire’s game.
His lycan enforcers brought their prisoner forward and whipped the hood off his head. The captured vamp winced in the bright moonlight and hissed. Alex ignored him, his attention on Zane.
“We good?” Alex asked when the vampire didn’t move, not a flicker of anything crossing his features.
After all the trouble he’d gone through get hold of the blood sucker—a deal with another pack alpha who had links with another city’s Mistress and her hellhound lover—if it was the wrong guy he was going to be pissed.
“Zane?”
The other man blinked, his eyes black as pitch. For a moment Alex was sucked in, the dark pools twin maelstroms of seething hatred and rage. Then Zane blinked and his expression settled back into one of amused blandness.
“Yeah, we’re good.”
He motioned and two vamps dragged a hooded figure forward to dump him on the ground at Alex’s feet. The hood was whipped off to reveal Davie’s youthful features.
Alex blinked, taken back years, remembering that same face alight with joyful amusement at some game he’d concocted to keep the child Davie amused. He’d liked the kid… he’d had a lot of potential. But that all died when the vampire’s blood slid down his throat. Now he was just another bloodsucker.
One who tried to kill Eva.
Before Alex could make a move, Eva’s voice sliced across the clearing.
“Davie! Oh my god, Davie. You’re alive!”
Alex spun on his heel to see her racing down the slope toward them. For a moment his jaw dropped in surprise. How the hell was she here? She should have been out for the count with the sedative Frank slipped into her soup. He slid a glance at his second in command, whose jaw ground in frustration.
Somehow Eva had outwitted them. Fuck. That didn’t look good in front of the vampires.
She reached them, panting with effort and launched herself at her brother, wrapping him in a bear hug.
“Eva. Step away from him.”
Everything in Alex stilled, his wolf snarling at the vampire so close to the woman they loved. The beast rushed to the surface, trying to break his hold so it could tear into the vampire. Rip it limb from limb so it could never threaten their woman again.
Eva turned, her arms still wrapped protectively around Da—the vampire. Alex wouldn’t even think of him using that name. He wasn’t Davie. He was a dead thing. One about to be even deader if he got his way.
“Alex, it’s Davie!”
Alex ground his teeth as the vampire smirked. Oh, he was good, keeping his fangs carefully hidden in case the sight of them triggered a flashback for Eva. Most vamp victims didn’t remember an attack, if they survived, but Eva wasn’t entirely human. She couldn’t be. No human could have found this clearing, not with the aversion wards through the forest. A human would have been forced back, fleeing the place to suffer weeks of nightmares that would ensure they never returned.
“Eva,” he moved forward, his hand outstretched to call her to him. “He’s not what you think he is.”
“Please don’t let them hurt me, Eva!” Davie clung to his sister, a sob in the back of his throat and Alex’s lips curled back from his teeth in a snarl.
Vampires were excellent actors. Which was great because he planned on seeing how well the asshole did flopping around like a fish out of water with his throat torn out. And that was just for starters. After that, they could move onto the disembowelment blues. Vampires were hardy creatures. It could take days for it to die. Every pain filled moment would be worth it for what he’d done to Eva.
“Eva, please!” the vampire wearing Davie’s face squeaked when Alex and Frank closed in threateningly.
“We done here, Kingwood?” Zane sighed and rolled his eyes, his hand firmly around the neck of the vampire Alex had tracked down.
“Yeah, we’re done. Have fun with your little friend.” He ignored the fact Zane’s claws were buried almost up to the first knuckle in the kneeling man’s throat, blood flowing freely down his neck. It was up to him what he did with his… subjects. Although, to be honest, he really wouldn’t want to be in that one’s shoes.
Zane grinned and yanked the captured vamp up to his feet. His expression was pure malevolence as he held the trembling guy in front of him in a loose embrace. Not a sexual one, although all the reports said Zane swung both ways, but still an intimate one. Zane was apparently a master of torture, though, and there was something about torture that created a link between the torturer and his or her victim.
“Oh, I intend to. Have fun with yours.”
And with a laugh, a cold wind blew through the clearing and the vampires were gone as though they’d never been there.
Alex returned his attention to Eva.
“You shut your mouth,” he glared at Davie. “Eva,” his voice was firmer this time as he injected a healthy dose of dominance from his wolf into it. “Step away from him. Now.”
“No.” Her chin shot up, lips set in a hard line as she challenged him with her gaze. “I won’t let you hurt him.”
Alex ignored the gasps that rolled around the clearing and stepped forward. To her credit, Eva didn’t back down, just glared right back. Curling his lips back from his teeth, he growled.
The sound started off low, but grew in intensity as he pushed more and more of his wolf into it. Her eyes widened and her lip quivered, but she still held her ground against him. Which shouldn’t be possible. He was alpha here and she was barely even lycan.
Their eyes l
ocked in a battle of wills. Stepping forward, he loomed over her, deepening his growl to make her yield to him. She would yield to him. New wolf she might be, kind of, and his body might burn for her, but he couldn’t let her challenge go unanswered.
“Back down, Eva…” he warned, knowing his wolf flared in his eyes. “Before this gets serious.”
With his words, he brought the full force of his dominance to bear. She gasped, her entire body trembling. Head bowed, she stepped away from Davie, her body fought every step of the way.
“Take him,” Alex ordered, motioning to Frank. Instantly two enforcers swooped in to drag the vampire away kicking and screaming. Alex didn’t bother to watch. His attention focused on Eva in front of him.
Shit. She had defied him.
In front of the entire pack.
“We are not human, Eva. Don’t ever make the mistake of thinking we are.” He didn’t reveal his inner turmoil, even though the need to take her into his arms and tell her it was going to be okay ate away at him.
It wasn’t going to be okay. She had challenged him
He had to punish her.
“She challenged a higher ranking wolf,” Isabella declared from the slopes. Grumbles of agreement followed her words, making Alex curse mentally. “Or is your ‘pet’ exempt, Alex?”
He shot a hard look toward the female, warning her to keep her mouth shut. But as bitchy as Isabella was, she was right. He couldn’t afford to have Eva relegated to ‘pet’ in the pack. That would lay her open to use by all… she’d be everyone’s bitch, literally.
And he would be forced to kill to protect her.
Frank stepped up to his side, a constant, reassuring presence. Coiled in his hand was the pack’s one instrument of discipline: a silver tipped, leather whip. Not designed for pleasure, it was an ugly thing, and Alex knew only too well its bite.
He sighed, stepping back.
