Primal Cravings

by Susan Sizemore

  “I’m glad you noticed. You might have the makings of a Tower witch, my dear.”

  Dee bit her lower lip to keep from making an indignant answer. He thought he’d complimented her. Tower witches were such snobs. Then again, every school of the Craft thought there way was best. “Go Travelers,” she muttered under her breath.

  “What’s that, my dear?”

  “I think your theories are fascinating,” Dee said quickly.

  “But they are in no way ready for experimentation.” Leon glared at Gary. “And never outside of a computer simulation.”

  “Be quiet and let me work!” Gary snapped at them.

  “Go ahead, end the world,” Leon shouted back. “Then I won’t have to put up with you anymore!”

  Dee sighed. As the person about to be sacrificed to bring about a world-ending event, she had other opinions.

  And she was scared to death.

  * * *

  “How long now?” Jake asked Levi. He was seated on the ground outside the cave. Having agreed to his brother’s plan, Jake was anxious to get on with it.

  Levi stopped pacing to stand in front of him. “Are you afraid the Dark Angels are already on the way to the rescue?”

  Jake shook his head. “My and the witch’s assignment was a sidebar. The Angels are on a much more important op.”

  Levi laughed. “Imagine the traitor Tobias’s surprise when his world suddenly fades away.”

  “Imagine,” Jake echoed. He got to his feet. “How long have you been planning this? How did you even think of it?”

  How long had Levi been in his head? Jake wondered. Had his doubts begun with that intrusion, or had the intrusion merely made him think more critically about things he already questioned?

  “I met Gary through my delivery business.” Levi gave a lewd chuckle. “When I brought him the woman, I found out he planned to use her as a sacrifice. I didn’t know mortals really did that sort of thing. Vampires need to kill mortals—that’s normal apex predator stuff. A Prime’s got to eat, and have a little fun doing it. But a mortal using another mortal to draw energy…I wanted to know why, and what he was up to. When he explained about how to get into parallel universes, it got me thinking about changing our luck, making things right for the Tribe.”

  “Getting Melchor back,” Jake said. “Making our Tribe powerful.”

  “Rulers of the universe. Maybe all the universes. Might as well be ambitious.”

  Jake nodded. “Might as well.”

  And an infinite number of Delilah McCoys.

  “It’ll be dawn soon,” Levi said. As if they couldn’t both feel it in their bones. “Gary likes to do spells as the sun come up. We should go in now.”

  Jake wiped his palms on his jeans. He wasn’t as calm as he needed to be. He nodded, and followed his brother into the cave.

  * * *

  “I am so pissed off at you, Yakov Piper,” Dee said.

  Jake tugged on the rope around one of her bare ankles. Then his gaze traveled up the length of her naked body until their gazes met. “You got yourself into this, Freckles.”

  “Be serious!” the Cave wizard ordered. “Stay where you are,” he said to Jake, who was at the foot of the altar.

  The wizard stood with his back to the wall. The heat in the cave was rising. The fire behind the wall burned closer to the surface. The magical shape was now a circle, reflecting exactly in the mirror on the opposite side of the altar.

  Levi stood at the top of the altar, by Dee’s head. He held a knife over her exposed throat. “When?” he asked his pet wizard.

  Gary ignored him. Jake saw Levi’s knuckles whiten on the knife hilt. How well he remembered Levi’s temper.

  “Leon, stand opposite me,” Gary said to the other prisoner.

  “You really don’t believe I’m going to help you with this,” Leon said.

  Gary cackled. “I want you sucked into the mirror as soon as I open the wall between universes.”

  “Then I am certainly not—”

  “Do what you’re told,” Levi ordered the old man. “If you want to live a few minutes longer.”

  There was no arguing with that tone. Leon sidled into his ordered place.

  Jake looked at the glowing wall, though not for long, as the heat scorched his skin. He then looked at the reflection in the mirror. “Is this how it works? You raise power from the depths of the earth, you raise power from the sacrifice. Then you use the power from the sacrifice to direct the earth power into the mirror. And that opens the door to other universes?”

  “You might end up with a pointy hat yet,” Dee murmured.

  Jake noticed that her voice was not steady, even though she tried for flippancy. He was very aware of her fear.

  Levi pressed the tip of the blade against Dee’s forehead. At the same time, Jake touched the arch of her foot, where he knew she was ticklish. Whether she jumped from fear or from sensitivity didn’t matter. The knife tip drew a drop of blood. Levi breathed in the distracting scent of blood and licked his lips.

  “She’s delicious,” Jake said.

  “Silence!” Gary yelled. “And stop questioning my magical methods!”

  “Which won’t work,” Leon added.

  “It was a reasonable question,” Jake said. He smiled at Levi. “Wasn’t it, brother?”

  Gary spat in disgust, then turned his back on the altar. He faced the cave wall, lifted his arms, and began to chant. It grew hotter with every word, and the light grew, red and orange and gold and pulsing with growing energy. Gary pulled the energy toward the surface of the world, toward himself.

  Jake was aware of magic though he tried to keep his attention from it. Dee’s gaze was on him, its touch as solid as the heat searing his skin.

  Levi was distracted by the sight and scent of Dee’s blood and her beautiful body laid out before him. Jake’s thoughts were full of having sex with Dee, of the taste of her blood. He wanted her.

  And Levi wanted her.

  Levi moved to the side of the altar. He pushed Leon out of the way. He put down the dagger and reached for Dee.

  Jake put a hand on Levi’s arm. “Mine!”

  Levi shook Jake off, turned a furious look on him. He was mad with lust, outraged at Jake’s defiance.

  The earth beneath them began to shake.

  Leon crawled to his feet. He held onto the altar to steady himself. Jake tumbled forward, grabbing Dee’s ankles to steady himself. Gary’s voice rose to a roaring crescendo. The wall exploded, tearing a hole in reality. A twisted tornado of energy poured out of the hole. It was like lightning, needing somewhere to ground.

  “Now!” Gary shouted.

  Levi reached for the sacrificial dagger. Leon snatched it up. Jake swept Dee aside. Her wrists were still tied to the head of the altar, but he’d snapped the bonds around her ankles. Vampires were strong, and claws easily snapped rope. She wasn’t completely free, but she was out of the way for the moment.

  “Stop this!” Leon shouted. The old Tower wizard leapt over the altar.

  “Don’t!” Dee shouted.

  Jake realized what she meant an instant before Leon plunged the dagger into Gary’s back.

  Sacrificial energy drew the released fire of Earth energy. Flame corkscrewed into the dead man, concentrated within the vessel of his corpse. Then it flowed out of Gary’s body and into the mirror. The next explosion was silent, but far more terrible. The mirror didn’t shatter, it began to iris open.

  “Holy crap!” Leon shouted.

  Levi still made the earth quake.

  “You know, they don’t use the Richter Scale anymore,” Jake said, almost casually. Then he punched his brother in the face.

  * * *

  Jake and his brother began to fight in the vicious, fierce way only vampires could, with fangs, claws, and impossible strength and speed. Dee’s heart cried out to help her bondmate.

  But the magic had to be stopped, dissipated. The world—worlds—had to be saved.

  “Cut me loos
e!” she shouted at Leon.

  “The dagger melted,” he shouted back.

  “Do something, Tower Boy! It’s your spell.”

  “My theories.”

  She struggled with her bonds while Leon raised his arms and began to chant. The earthquake had subsided, but rocks were falling from the roof of the cave. One hit her on the shoulder.

  The vampires grappled around the altar. Blood splattered out from bites and deep gashes. Leon had to jump back to avoid the flailing bodies. They moved past him. Dee caught an upside down view of them as Jake and Levi went past her head. She hoped the blood on Jake’s mouth wasn’t his own.

  The rope scraped and burned her wrist, but she managed to get one hand free. A large rock came down and hit the side of the altar as she managed to sit up. It bounced off and toward the mirror—

  Where it disappeared into the black nothingness that grew larger and somehow darker by the second. Levi saw it happen, and laughed. The sound was the most frightening thing Dee had ever heard.

  She knew exactly what it meant.

  “Close it, Leon!” Dee shouted.

  “Working on it.”

  Levi wrestled Jake closer to the iris. Slowly, inexorably, the black opening widened. Soon it would be large enough for a body to go through.

  Dee stretched out as far as she could. She kicked Levi in the back. This put him off balance for an instant, but it was long enough.

  Jake spun Levi around and pushed. Levi was knocked into the blackness. His head and shoulders disappeared. His hands still grasped Jake’s arms. Jake kicked Levi’s legs out from under him.

  Dee screamed from the horrible pain of dislocating her shoulder, but she managed to grab the waist at the back of Jake’s jeans. She held on. Jake kicked his brother again.

  And Levi was gone.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  “Bad idea!” Leon yelled. “He’s added to the instability.”

  Jake didn’t care. His only concern was Dee. Her pain roared through him as he turned to her. She whimpered when he snipped the last of the ropes holding her. Her arm was limp. He quickly scooped her off the altar.

  She turned her head toward Leon. “What’s happening?”

  “We’re all going to die!”

  She looked past Jake’s shoulder. “It’s almost all the way open.”

  Jake carried her away from the altar, and the awful hole opening from outside the world. “It’s going to suck everything inside, isn’t it?” he whispered to her.

  Behind them, Leon went back to chanting a spell.

  Dee was breathing hard in pain and stifled a groan before answering. “Probably. Put me down. We need more witches to channel the energy. That would—”

  “Uncle Leon?” a voice called from the cave mouth.

  “Mary?” Leon called back.

  Dee relaxed against Jake with a relieved sigh. “Thank the goddess, the Sachers got my text messages.”

  Jake recalled that Dee had done quite a bit of texting on the drive to Arizona. “You called in the cavalry.” It was half accusation, half amusement.

  “They’re Tower folk.” She jerked her head back toward the spreading darkness. “This is their kind of work.”

  “Help!” Leon yelled.

  Jake moved himself and Dee aside as a half dozen mortals came racing in. When the Sacher family saw what was happening there were exclamations and swearing, but they quickly lined up around Leon. They began to chant and gesture. Jake decided to take this as a sign the world was about to be saved. Even if it wasn’t, he wanted to spend his last moments with his bondmate.

  He picked Dee up and carried her outside. She only protested a little about how she should help.

  “Not your kind of magic,” he said. “And you can’t wave your arm when it’s broken.”

  “I don’t think it’s broken. But it sure as hell hurts,” she conceded.

  He ran his hands over her arm and shoulder. “Sorry.”

  He pulled. Her shoulder popped back into place.

  Dee shouted, “You son of a—!”

  Jake kissed Dee. She struggled for a moment, then she pulled him closer and her mouth clung fiercely to his. He was already aware she was naked, but it took him a while to realized her bare skin was cold. Dawn light bathed her skin in gold, but it wasn’t doing anything to warm her up.

  Dee broke the kiss to say, “It’s December, and I’m frozen.”

  “It’s hot in the cave.”

  “And my clothes are in there.”

  So were a lot of witches, and possibly the end of the world. And….

  He looked toward the cave mouth.

  Dee stroked his cheek. “What did you see? Before Levi went through.”

  Bondmates know things about each other. Whether they wanted them to or not. Jake sighed.

  “For an instant—it was my imagination—but for an instant I thought I saw Melchor.”

  “Not your Melchor,” she said.

  He nodded. He kissed her forehead very tenderly on the spot where the knife point had cut her. “Thank you for trusting me. The vision I had when we were with Tobias—it ended with you tied up on an altar.”

  “I had a few nanoseconds of doubt,” she admitted. She hugged him, with the arm that wasn’t hurting. “We’re partners.”

  “I realized that just because you were supposed to be a sacrifice didn’t mean you had to die. I wouldn’t have let anything happen.”

  She slapped his shoulder. “You could have told me!”

  Jake shook his head. “Not with Levi trying to get back into my mind.” He rested his forehead against Dee’s. Their thoughts and emotions mingled. Their souls touched, blended. This was how a bond ought to feel. How long had Levi been keeping him from this fulfillment?

  “He needed to die,” Jake said, knowing it was true even as a moment of guilt ripped through him. “For all the things he’d done. For what he was trying to do. He was too dangerous, too crazy. Nothing could help him.”

  “I’m still sorry it was you who had to do it.”

  “It’s better that it was me, I think.” Jake brightened. “It’s good to know that I’m not the last Leviathan—though I am perfectly content being a Piper. I have my nieces. And I have you. I love you,” he told her. “Is that the first time I’ve said it?”

  She nodded, smiling. “It is.”

  “Not the last time, I promise.” He stroked her face, traced her lips. “Levi promised me an infinite number of Delilah McCoy’s. All I want is this one.”

  Leon Sacher appeared at the cave mouth. “It’s all right now. Everything is under control. You can come back in.”

  “I believe I’m beginning to understand why vampires keep mortals around,” Jake said. “Put enough of them together in the same place, and they can save the world for us.” He picked her up.

  “Hey!” Dee said as Jake swept her back up to carry her inside. “I can walk.”

  “You’ll hurt your feet on the rocks.”

  “I happened to be a member of the toughest commando unit in this universe,” she said. “So are you.”

  “Oh, yes.” Jake groaned. “You do realize what is going to be worse than what happened in that cave, don’t you?”

  “All the teasing we’re going to get from the Dark Angels when we come home all bonded and lovey dovey.”

  “We’re tough enough to take it, right partner?”

  She kissed his chin. “Oh, yeah. Partner. You know, we’re in Sedona. It’s a resort town. How about a honeymoon before going back to face the music?”

  —The End—

  * * *

  Books in the Vampire Primes series:

  I BURN FOR YOU

  I THIRST FOR YOU

  I HUNGER FOR YOU

  MASTER OF DARKNESS

  PRIMAL HEAT

  PRIMAL DESIRES

  PRIMAL NEEDS

  DARK STRANGER

  PRIMAL INSTINCTS

  PRIMAL CALL—available in ebook format

  PRIMAL CRAVINGS
—available in ebook format

  BY SUN AND CANDELIGHT—available in ebook format

  * * *

  Upcoming Vampire Primes books, exclusively in ebook format:

  CHILDREN OF THE NIGHT, YOU’RE GROUNDED

  FIREBIRD

  DON’T BLINK

  * * *

  To join Susan Sizemore’s mailing list for updates on all her books, send an email to sgsizemore@msn.com

  * * *

  Excerpt from Children of the Night, You’re Grounded

  A new Vampire Primes story by Susan Sizemore

  The old cemetery had the look of a horror movie set. Which was as it should be, Ariadne thought. The moon was full overhead, with high clouds scuttling across its face. The church in the background was abandoned and run down, with dark, gaping, broken windows. A scattering of gnarled old trees thrust skeletal fingers of branches into the air. Many of the headstones were fallen, and most of the rest were crooked.

  “Brin says it’s the perfect place to go ghost hunting,” Ariadne told her twin sister Cheetah after they jumped over the rusting, shoulder-high iron fence to get into the place.

  Cheetah’s actual name was Celeste, but who could blame someone named Celeste for taking what at least she thought was a cool nickname because she was on the track team? Ariadne wasn’t all that thrilled with her own so old-fashioned it was from the Bronze Age name, but didn’t feel it necessary to tart it up or change it.

  Cheetah took a few steps into the cemetery. Dead leaves crackled under her feet. The wind gave an obligingly mournful howl. She turned around slowly, arms out, eyes closed. “What does a ghost feel like?” she asked when she opened her eyes.

  Ariadne shrugged. “I guess that’s what we’re here to find out.”

  Cheetah snorted.

  All right, the real reason they’d sneaked out of their great-grandmother’s high-security mansion had been because of an ongoing war with the old lady about their social lives. If they didn’t fight the system they wouldn’t have social lives. And they were also here to see a couple of boys invited on this supernatural excuse-to-hookup gathering their friend Brin had organized. Actually, Brin’s motives were pure and deeply nerdy. She’d claimed to have read how-to ebooks on ghost hunting and to watch television shows on the subject. Apparently there were techniques and equipment and protocols for searching for evidence of disembodied spirits.