Rebel Bitten (Blood Alliance Book 4)

by Lexi C. Foss

  Fuck, I was a mess. I hadn’t felt like this in… ever. Yeah, never. This didn’t happen to me. And why the hell was I still bleeding?

  I tried to focus on my wrist, my eyes widening, then narrowing at the jagged teeth marks. Huh. Willow really had bitten me. Why hadn’t I felt it?

  “Fine.” Damien’s voice came to me again. “Four hours.”

  I scowled. “Bury us.”

  “We’ll be there,” Damien said, hanging up. He approached again, his expression hard. “I’d apologize for this, but I think you kind of deserve it.”

  I frowned at him. “What?” This wasn’t the plan. We were supposed to—

  Damien’s fist flew at my face, meeting my jaw in an astonishingly accurate punch. I should have been able to duck, but I didn’t even see it coming, nor did I have anywhere to go.

  I also should have been prepared for the second one.

  Only, I wasn’t in the right frame of mind to comprehend his actions.

  And it fucking hurt.

  We’re going to have a very serious talk in a few minutes, I thought at him, woozy and spinning in a world of darkness.

  The third punch did me in.

  I swore I heard him chuckle.

  Or maybe that was me.

  Because all I could think about was how I intended to kill him the second I woke up.

  With at least three bullets.

  One for each hit.

  Dick.

  21

  Ryder

  My head fucking hurt.

  What the hell did I do last night? It reminded me of that time Damien and I had indulged in six bottles of tequila just to see what it would do.

  Answer: severe dehydration.

  And it had sucked.

  I’d refused to touch the shit ever since, which was a damn shame since I lived in Texas. Or did I?

  My fingers flexed as I tried to lift them to my head, only to find them handcuffed behind my back. I frowned. What the fuck?

  It took significant effort to open my eyes, almost as though I’d been severely drugged. My dry mouth added to the effect, as did my general dizziness.

  “I need you to hear me out before you try to kill me,” a familiar voice said, causing me to frown.

  Why the hell would I want to kill Damien? He was my best friend. My progeny. One of the only beings in this world I could trust.

  Only, a memory started to resurface that had me thinking otherwise. Something about my pet…

  My eyes flew open as I realized what it was, then I winced at the intense light coming in from my living room windows. I looked around quickly, realizing where we were.

  Back in Texas.

  What the fuck?

  I found the source of my confusion standing a few feet away with his arms folded across his plain white shirt, looking only slightly contrite.

  “You fucking punched me.” And, ugh, did we have to do this in daylight? It made the entire room so damn bright.

  “I did a lot more than punch you,” he admitted. “But hear me out.”

  “Get these handcuffs off of me.” They were the ones I used to hold vampires in my basement. I could tell by the way they refused to bend.

  “I will once I’m confident you won’t try to shoot me.”

  “Oh, I’m absolutely going to shoot you,” I promised. “Where the hell is Willow?”

  “She’s alive.” The way he said it had me narrowing my eyes.

  “You don’t sound very sure about that.”

  “She nearly killed you, Ryder,” he replied on a growl.

  My eyebrows shot up, a humorless laugh leaving my lips. “Pretty sure I’d remember that.”

  He scrubbed his hand over his face, allowing me to see his exhaustion. “Something’s wrong with her.”

  “No shit,” I deadpanned.

  “No, you don’t understand. She bit you.” He started to pace. “She took a chunk out of your damn wrist.”

  “I did that when I was trying to feed her,” I snapped. Although, I did vaguely recall jagged teeth marks on my wrist, the memory somewhat clear.

  He shook his head. “No. I mean, yes, you did, but then she bit you, Ryder. Like, really bit you.” He stopped in front of me. “She bit you like a fucking lycan.”

  I tried to recall exactly what had happened after I opened my vein for her, but it was a blur. However, I did remember feeling strange and knowing the process had taken on a unique twist.

  Rather than comment on it, I glanced around again. Damien must have knocked me out with drugs afterward to get me on a plane back to Texas. I could only assume he had a logical reason for it. “Why are we here?”

  “I called Izzy because I wanted to talk to Luka, but she insisted on sending me to Jace. So I spoke to him based on her recommendation. Then I found out he was currently in Clemente Clan territory, and, well, I arranged a meeting. Edon’s on his way here. With Jace. They’ll be here any minute now.”

  “You invited a royal vampire into my private home.” I uttered the words slowly, unable to comprehend why my progeny would make such a decision.

  I didn’t enjoy entertaining company of any type, let alone a damn royal. There were sixteen others in existence, seventeen if I included myself, and eighteen if I counted Lilith. They were the oldest and most powerful of my kind, and I liked exactly one of them—myself.

  Well, I could tolerate Kylan on a good day.

  And maybe Jace.

  But today was not a good day.

  Which was why I demanded to know: “Have you lost your fucking mind?” Because my progeny knew how I felt about the pretentious members of the council. Inviting one into my sanctuary ranked somewhere around eating cow shit. Hence the reason I’d gone after Silvano when he trotted an army of unwanted company through my lands.

  “I could ask you the same thing,” he muttered, collapsing into my favorite recliner chair as though he owned it. “Izzy swore to me that Jace won’t take advantage of the situation. He’s only coming to help.”

  I’d known Izzy for the same length of time as I’d known Damien. They were twins, after all. But Damien had been my confidant and best friend, while Izzy had been more akin to a little sister to me. Which was why it had infuriated me when Cam took her as his Erosita.

  A thousand years later and it still made my blood boil.

  She was too good for him.

  At least the bastard knew it.

  Except he’d left her alone for over a century now with Majestic Clan. Oh, it wasn’t by choice—that much I understood—but he was doing one hell of a job finding his way back to her.

  I shook my head, not wanting to go down that land mine of a thought trail right now and instead focused on the present situation.

  “Where’s Willow?” I asked again.

  Damien sighed and pushed away from the chair, leaving me handcuffed on the couch. We were going to need to discuss this behavior at length later. After I shot him a few times.

  I carefully twisted my hands as far as the metal allowed to begin working on the release mechanism I’d built into these. Every gadget I owned was one I knew how to manipulate. It was Survival Instinct 101 to program in fail-safes only I could figure out.

  Damien knew this about me, which meant he also knew it was only a matter of time before I freed myself and kicked his ass.

  He returned a minute later with an unconscious Willow in his arms. I frowned as he laid her down beside me. “She’s missing a vital trait to indicate life,” I told him, a snarl underlining my tone. She didn’t have a damn heartbeat, nor was she breathing. When I finished breaking out of these cuffs, he was a dead man.

  “I realize that,” he muttered. “She’s in some sort of limbo state, and she’s been there for hours.”

  I paused at that. “Hours?” A mortal couldn’t remain in limbo for hours without a heartbeat. But as I looked at her again, I noticed the lack of rigor mortis setting in. “How many hours?”

  “Seven,” he replied. “She took her last breath before
we boarded the plane. I tried to resuscitate her, but she fell into this state… and hasn’t come back.”

  “Because you didn’t bury her.”

  He shook his head. “She wasn’t transitioning, Ryder. You couldn’t see it through your delirium, but your blood didn’t take.”

  “How is that possible?” In all my very long life, I had never heard of a human rejecting the transformation into the undead life.

  “I don’t know. That’s why I called Izzy,” Damien said. “It’s like Willow’s trapped in the lycan conversion phase, not a vampire one.”

  I stopped messing with the handcuffs and studied Willow, a memory nagging at me. “Her injuries that day by the river…” I trailed off, picturing them. “It looked like she’d been ripped open by a wolf.” I’d thought they were claw marks, but… “What if those wounds had been created by teeth?”

  “Then she would have begun the transition while waiting for the follow-up bite,” Damien said, his tone indicating he’d already considered this avenue of thought. “She should be dead.”

  “Yes,” I agreed.

  The lycan transition required a sequence of two bites. If the mortal didn’t receive the requisite follow-up bite, the human would die an excruciatingly painful death.

  I gaped at my darling pet, her warrior strength taking on a whole new meaning. “If she was bitten at the camp, then she ran all the way here while fighting the transition.”

  “And then you gave her your blood,” Damien put in, drawing my gaze back to his, another piece of the puzzle sliding into place.

  “Effectively curing her,” I whispered. “At least temporarily.”

  “And you continued to give her blood over the last month.”

  “So my essence kept her alive and in limbo this entire time,” I breathed, awed. “That would explain her sudden catatonic state. The moon energy would have encouraged her to shift last night.” While lycans could control when they took on their wolf forms, a young changeling like Willow who hadn’t indulged in her animal side might not be able to so easily fight it. “Except she couldn’t shift.”

  “Because she’s missing the second bite. And you couldn’t turn her because she was already in lycan limbo,” Damien said. “That’s my theory.”

  “Which is why you wanted to talk to Luka.”

  “Which is why I wanted to talk to Luka,” he agreed. “But we’re getting the new alpha next door instead.”

  Edon.

  I’d met him briefly last month during the whole Silvano fiasco. My predecessor had orchestrated some sort of game with the old alpha of Clemente Clan—Walter. It hadn’t gone according to plan for either of them, as they’d died. Hence my newly appointed position and Edon’s ascension. Which reminded me… “Did I hear you mention a triad at one point?”

  “Yeah, he completed it last night before his ascension. Jace was in the middle of the post-celebratory festivities when I called.”

  I could only imagine what that meant. Jace had a notorious fetish for lycans. “I see.”

  Damien cleared his throat. “That’s not all. I was able to download Willow’s file on the flight here. It reflects a history of noncompliance at the breeding camps. There are videos of her fighting them while they rutted. The footage is… graphic.”

  We’d lived through countless acts of violence. As such, not much fazed me and Damien, but I caught the glimmer of remorse in his gaze. That alone implied whatever Willow had experienced was the epitome of vile.

  He cleared his throat again. “They marked her for termination, determining she wasn’t suitable to carry a child due to her inability to comply.”

  Damien stared at me, his look telling me he had more to say and I wasn’t going to like it. I dipped my chin in a subtle way to encourage him to continue.

  “Willow was marked for termination after her third week at the camp, yet Blood Day was several months ago. That means there are at least two months of data missing from her record. I’ve heard rumors of what lycans do when playing with humans. None of them are good.”

  “Then I suppose it’s a good thing Edon is coming over. I have a few questions for him.”

  “I imagine you do, yes,” Damien agreed.

  We fell into a comfortable silence while I finished unlatching the cuffs at my back. I brought them around to lie on the coffee table before me. Damien didn’t even flinch. He knew I’d free myself and had banked on providing enough information up front that I wouldn’t lunge at him.

  “I’m still going to shoot you,” I promised. “But as we’re expecting company, I’d prefer my only ally to be healthy and aware for the meeting.”

  He lifted a shoulder, uncaring. “I’ll take a bullet.”

  “Three,” I corrected. “One for each hit.”

  “Then, technically, you owe me four,” he drawled. “I had to make sure you were really unconscious.”

  My jaw ticked as I studied my wrists. The only evidence of a wound was the dried blood on my sleeve, which could have been from me slicing open my own vein. Except I felt the lethargy in my body, an odd sort of sensation I hadn’t experienced since my youth. It indicated I’d gone too long without blood. As I could survive on very little in my old age, the hunger rioting inside me was telling.

  I’d lost a lot of my essence, and somehow, I hadn’t felt it until it was too late.

  “There’s another bag of O-negative in the warmer,” Damien said. “You’ve already gone through three. It’s how I revived you.”

  My eyebrows shot up. “Three bags?”

  “Plus two on the plane to keep you alive,” Damien replied. “Your wound was healing at an almost mortal rate. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  I glanced at it again, then down at Willow. “Only lycan bites can slow a vampire’s healing.”

  “Thus adding credence to the theory,” Damien murmured. “She’s clearly not your average mortal.”

  “What the hell did they do to her?” I wondered, awed and sickened at the same time.

  “A question we should have an answer to momentarily,” my progeny said as my alarms began to blare with an intruder warning. We both looked at the screen to see a car coming our way with four individuals inside.

  Damien stood and walked over to zoom in on the panel to reveal Edon behind the wheel. The body thermal image beside it indicated two more lycans sat in the back, and a vampire in the trunk. Jace was obviously the latter—he would have chosen to hide from the sun to conserve his senses—but I wasn’t expecting the former. “Did Edon mention bringing company?”

  “Silas and Luna,” Damien replied. “His mates.”

  Yeah, I knew who they were. I’d met them briefly last month. “Okay.”

  “I’ll stall them while you shower and change,” Damien said.

  I shook my head. “No. We’ve already spent time we didn’t have to waste. Let them in now.”

  While it went against my instincts to grant entry to a royal and an alpha while in a weakened state, I knew my house better than they did. If they chose to fight me on my turf, they’d pay a hefty price.

  Damien seemed ready to argue but smartly chose not to. “At least drink some blood while I go greet them.”

  I only partially conceded on that point. “Do they know about Willow?” I asked as I went to retrieve the blood from the warmer in the kitchen.

  Each step hurt more than it should, further confirming I’d been in a bad spot when Willow drank from me.

  I frowned, concerned by my temporary loss of focus during her transformation. That never should have happened because I should have felt the depletion long before it became a reality.

  Had I just been so lost to the sensation and desire to help her that I’d ignored all the signs in my body? If so, that made her far more dangerous than I ever could have anticipated. Because she’d truly brought me to my knees.

  Hell, had Damien not been there, she might have even killed me.

  I picked up the blood bag as he joined me in the kitchen.


  “No. Izzy told Jace we had a problem involving a lycan, and that’s all I allowed him to know as well,” he said, answering my question about what Jace and Edon knew. “I also phrased it in a way that insinuated urgency.”

  That was one of his talents—communicating in a manner that stressed importance without giving away the key points.

  The sound of a car door slamming out front had me saying, “Then let’s go bring them up to speed.”

  22

  Ryder

  I leaned against the frame of my front door, watching as Edon and Jace walked up the path with Luna and Silas behind them. Jace glanced at the blood bag in my hand and arched a brow as I brought it to my mouth to take a long pull from the contents.

  “I’ve had one hell of a night,” I said by way of explanation.

  He took in the blood on my sleeve and my rumpled suit. “Looks like it.”

  I grunted and pushed off the frame, not allowing them entry yet. The second they were inside, they’d be able to smell Willow—if they couldn’t already—and I wanted answers first.

  “Tell me about your breeding camps, Alpha,” I said, addressing Edon. “What happens when you mark a human for termination?”

  His obsidian eyes met mine, his dominance palpable as he took my measure. He had a few inches over my six-foot height, and his shoulders were slightly bulkier than mine, but I suspected I’d still best him in a fight, even in my current state. Mostly because I could use his two weaknesses against him—the pair of pups at his back.

  “You brought us here to talk about the breeding camps?” He sounded incredulous. “I thought you had a lycan problem.”

  “I do, and that might turn to plural—lycans—depending on how you answer my question. So I’ll ask again: What do you do with humans marked for termination?”

  “We kill them,” he answered immediately.

  “Do you?” I countered, glancing at Damien.

  “Is that an immediate sort of thing or a gradual process?” my progeny asked, arching a dark brow.

  “How about we not dance around the issue and get straight to the point,” Jace interjected, stepping forward. “Ismerelda doesn’t make a habit of calling me for unnecessary chitchat.”