Dawn of Eve

by Pam Godwin

  “When hybrids bite,” Salem said, “they don’t experience arousal.”

  True, because the venom altered that part of their brains, separating bloodlust from sexual lust.

  “But they still feel something,” I said, “because they’re driven to breed. To rape.” My muscles hardened, instincts engaging. “What about you? If it looks like a hybrid, walks like a hybrid, bites like a hybrid…”

  “I might be like your fathers.” He lifted, just an inch, and a chill seeped between our bodies. “I’ve never forced a woman. I’ve also never encountered one who tried to entrance me with her eyes.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Nor am I entrancing you.”

  We regarded each other, breaths colliding in a heady cloud of suspicion and desire. There were so many things going on in his gaze, his pupils flickering at the center of ductile silver disks that seemed to flex with the light. And deeper, beneath the reflective metal of his eyes, loomed a blizzard of emotion.

  He was as powerless as I was to ignore the intoxicating energy enveloping us. It overtook my senses, coaxed my hands to his sculpted pectorals, and lifted my mouth, my lips hovering a hair’s breadth from his.

  “You’re not a hybrid.” I’d never wanted to be this close, this intimate, with anything that had fangs.

  “I’m a deviation.” A frown creased his brow. “Like you.”

  “But this attraction…” I shook my head, tried to clear it. “It has to be the dart. Whatever we were injected with is fucking with our senses.”

  He slid his hand down my throat, a slight tremor in his fingers. “Or this is something else entirely.”

  Something organic? Some kind of incorporeal force coming from within us, from whatever made us different? It made me nervous, cagey. I needed space.

  I pushed against his chest. “I don’t trust you.”

  He nodded, but the flash in his eyes said he’d just accepted a challenge.

  “What happens to the humans you bite?” I asked. “Do they grow fangs?”

  “Never.” His eyes hardened. “When I bite you, you’ll orgasm harder than you ever have, but you won’t grow fangs.”

  “We need to find a way out of here.” I glanced at the steel door, the only thing that should’ve been holding my attention in this spartan room.

  His nostrils flared. “You’re bleeding.”

  My leg?

  I didn’t have a word for how quickly he moved. One second he was in my face and the next he was on my thigh, the bandage ripped away, and his mouth sealed to my injury.

  “Please, don’t bite me.” My breath rushed out, my entire body frozen beneath him.

  His eyes lifted to mine, shining like vivid bits of colored glass as he swept his tongue around my wound. My mind revolted at the sight of him licking me, but my body gravitated closer, into the storm of his gaze, pressing against his blood-stained lips.

  “The human mouth is dirtier than a latrine.” I gripped his hair, a pointless attempt to pull him away.

  He smiled against my flesh. “So I’m human now?”

  “No, I…I don’t know.”

  A deep groan rumbled in his chest, and he tore at the hole in my pants until my leg was bare from the thigh down. The feel of his body against my skin produced a sharp ache below my waist. My heart thundered, and my fingernails bit into my palms. I wanted him closer, so close that I’d feel more than just the warmth of his mouth.

  His complexion seemed to darken with each passing second, his eyes flashing through a kaleidoscope of colors. Was my blood doing this to him? How long had it been since he’d fed? He wasn’t sucking, simply cleaning my injury. Why did that disappoint me? Why did I want so badly to feel him drawing on my veins?

  A loud electric buzz startled me out of my trance, followed by the vibration of metal. The steel door slid slowly sideways as if hung on a track controlled by mechanical gears. My muscles tensed.

  Salem sat back on his heels, gaze on the door and expression unreadable. He wiped an arm across his lips. “Stay back.”

  But I was already moving, scrambling to my feet, hell bent on fighting my way out of this room.

  The steel barrier inched away, revealing more steel behind it. Bars. A gate? Fuck!

  Torchlights danced along a stonewall that butted against another wall on the left. We were at the end of a corridor that tunneled to the right and out of view. Did it lead to the surface? Deeper into the bowels of this nightmare?

  I slammed into the gate, gripped the rungs, and shook it with all my might.

  “Dawn, get back.” Salem grabbed my arm, the urgency in his voice spiking the hairs on my nape.

  I let him pull me away just as a swirl of shadows crept across the floor on the other side. Multiple shadows. And the sounds… Nails scraping concrete. Low throaty snarls. Clanging chains.

  “What is that?” I whispered, backing up until I bumped into Salem’s chest.

  “Dinner.”

  His arms wrapped around my waist, holding me to him as something came into view in the hall. Hands. Then three tiny bodies. Sweet fucking hell, they were toddlers, no older than two or three, crawling along the floor in ragged, dirty clothes. Pale skin, bright eyes, sweet faces.

  Salem would have to step over my dead body if he intended to feed from them.

  Everything went still—their tiny fingers freezing on the floor, their eyes unblinking, the rattle of chains around their necks falling silent. My stomach hardened, and Salem turned to stone against my back.

  Something was wrong, so very very wrong. It wasn’t just the abhorrent age of the children or the chain leashes hooked to metal collars around their necks. It was the way they peered through the vertical bars of the gate, drooling from fanged mouths and staring up at me like I was dinner.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “Salem…” I whispered beneath my breath, but it came out too loud, prompting a chorus of growls from the hybrid children.

  My shoulders bunched, and my nerves fried with agonizing dread. Any second that gate would open, and I would have to use my hands to break their tiny bodies. Unless they broke me first.

  Salem shoved me behind him, pressing my back against the farthest wall. “Don’t move.”

  I opened my mouth to agree and slammed it shut at the sight of his throat. Holy shit, his veins… The labyrinth of vessels fanned down his neck, his chest, reaching toward his heart. With each breath he took, the vascular bundles gleamed brighter, clearer, in a striation of red and silver.

  “Look down.” I pointed a shaky finger as adrenaline surged through my own blood. “You see it, right? Your veins are glowing through your skin.”

  He stared at his torso, brushed a hand across his pecs, and the silver things fluttered through his blood. He shook his head, brows pulling together.

  Could I see something he couldn’t? Was I losing my mind?

  Behind him, the hybrids attacked the gate, snapping monstrous teeth and stretching thin, pallid arms through the six-inch gap at the bottom.

  Salem prowled toward them, shoulders squared, the muscles along his spine flexing. Luminous veins spread from beneath his sooty hair, stretching outward from the base of his skull and feathering down his back. But it was the transformation in his demeanor that alarmed me the most. He seemed to grow taller, harder, more aggressive. What the fuck was he doing?

  He reached the gate, let out a cruel, feral snarl, and lunged. The babies cowered, their tiny human cries raising bumps across my skin. But their fear was fleeting. They slammed against the gate with renewed ferocity, climbing over one another and craning their necks to fix their rabid stares on me.

  I tried to step back, but my heels hit the wall. I wanted to sink into the concrete and escape on the other side. I’d never killed a child—hybrid or otherwise. I would if I had to, but the thought made my stomach fold in on itself.

  Salem crouched in front of the gate, not a twitch in his muscles as the hybrids hissed and spit inches from his face. “Close your eyes,
Dawn.”

  Nope, not happening. For all I knew, he was one of them. At this point, I wasn’t sure I should blink.

  Without a backward glance, he reached through the rungs, snatched the chains connected to their collars, and gathered them in both hands. The leashes snapped taut, leading into the darkness, and Salem pulled on them, wrestling for slack against whoever held the ends. The metal links slid through his hands, but he held on, fighting with the unseen force.

  The hybrids fell upon his arm, sinking their teeth into his flesh. I flinched, panicking. What was he trying to do? Pin the hybrids to the rungs? It wasn’t a bad idea. If they were restrained, we might have a fighting chance when the gate opened. But they were biting him!

  My muscles burned to go to him. I shouldn’t, and I wouldn’t if I had any common sense.

  I must’ve gotten hit on the head when I was captured, because my legs started moving, sprinting across the room. I grabbed the leashes through the bars, barely dodging a fang.

  Sliding my hands over his, I held tight, and together we wrenched the leashes through to our side. The creatures lunged for me, but Salem knocked them back, taking more bites to his arm. My fingers ached from clenching, and the rusty links tore at my palms as I tried to evade those lethal mouths.

  Salem hissed at the hybrids, his arm shredded in bloody bites. They didn’t back off. They couldn’t, not with the tug-of-war on their tethers.

  While I wrestled the chains, Salem reached farther through the rungs. Before I could question him, he wrapped huge hands around their heads and bashed them violently against the bars, over and over.

  The sound of crushing bone simmered bile in my chest. My stomach twisted on the verge of emptying. Logically, I knew they were a threat that needed to be eliminated, but as their faces bled and buckled inward and their little bodies slumped, all I saw were children. A dead child is a dead child.

  Except they weren’t dead. The blunt impact had stunned them, but already their limbs were twitching, rising, reanimating with vicious intent.

  Salem used that window of recovery to pound his fists into their skulls. One by one, he smashed brains and bits of bone into the concrete, each blow splattering more gore and cracking a fissure of anguish inside me.

  Achy pressure invaded my jaw. I clenched it, tightened my fists on the chains, and hooked them around a rung for leverage against the opposing force at the other end. Now would’ve been a good time to close my eyes, but I couldn’t look away from the horror and destruction exploding in front of me.

  Salem slammed his fists hard and repeatedly with a savagery I would’ve never been able to inflict. I wanted to stop him. Stop the wet meaty thuds, the coppery scent of blood, the tiny faces collapsing into flattened pulp. It was more than my heart could handle. But there was no place for that kind of sensitivity. Not in this room. Not in this cruel world.

  I pretended my eyes didn’t itch and burn, pretended my throat wasn’t swollen with heartache, and hung on to the chains until he decided they were dead.

  He pulled his hands back through the gate and pried my numb fingers off the chains. The reins snapped out of reach, and the carnage jerked like gruesome marionettes on wires, the collars still attached to their necks.

  I covered my mouth with my forearm and fought the urge to puke. The leashes scraped across the concrete, dragging away the remains and leaving behind a red slick trail. Tremors attacked my limbs as the scrape of chains faded down the corridor and fell silent.

  “Who are you?” Salem shouted, gripping the rungs and rattling the gate. He threw his body into it and raised his voice. “What do you want?”

  Footsteps approached, confident, unhurried. The tread of boots. Rubber soles.

  My knees locked up, my entire body frozen as I stared at the corridor a few feet away. Salem was either stupidly brave or just plain stupid, because he pressed his cheek against the bars, trying to get a glimpse of whatever was coming.

  “Can you see anything?” I whispered.

  He shook his head without lifting his gaze from the hall.

  The footfalls stopped just out of view, and something skidded across the blood-smeared floor. The corner of a brown object slipped under the gate.

  I unlocked my joints and stepped to the side, peering around Salem’s broad frame. A cardboard flat sat in the corridor, filled with hunks of meat, cooked rice, bottled water, and…bandages? I didn’t realize how hungry I was until the aroma of fire-roasted fish teased the air. The smell also made my nausea a thousand times worse.

  “Show yourself,” Salem said, his voice low and dangerous. Fists wrapped around the rungs, he shoved against the gate. “Fucking coward!”

  As the footsteps retreated, I stared at Salem’s back, mesmerized by the dimming flicker of his veins. The smaller capillaries farthest from his core vanished first, and the fade-out swept inward until his skin was once again a blank canvas.

  “Salem, your back.” I squinted harder, questioning my damn eyesight. “Your veins just disappeared.”

  Was it an illusion? Some kind of mutation connected to his emotions or to the vicinity of our captor? Maybe I’d been injected with a chemical that controlled my vision?

  He glanced at his chest and returned his attention to the corridor. “I don’t know what it means.”

  An electric buzz sounded overhead. With a grinding rattle, the door emerged from the frame, sliding out of the wall and forcing Salem to release his hold on the gate. Would it crush him if he hadn’t moved?

  “The food.” I jerked forward.

  He hooked a finger in the cardboard lip and yanked the tray into the room. Then he fought the door, shoving with contracted muscles. It didn’t stop moving, didn’t budge an inch. He jerked his fingers away just as the exit sealed shut.

  The horror of the past few minutes hung in the air. Every breath tasted stagnant and disease-ridden, magnifying the dread curdling inside me. Salem took a step toward me, but whatever he saw in my expression made him stop just out of arm’s reach.

  For a breathless moment, we stared at each other, his gunmetal eyes searching mine. Trust wasn’t the word I’d use to describe the sensation that pulled me toward him, but fuck me, he was the only potential ally I had in this nightmare.

  “That was really fucked up.” I stepped closer, scanning his flawless face for a hint of humanity.

  Please don’t let him be okay with what just happened.

  “I told you to close your eyes.” He stared down at his mangled arms, his gaze turning inward, unreadable.

  I didn’t expect tears of remorse and any obvious sign of emotion, but he seemed…dazed, unsettled. That was a whole lot better than indifference.

  “Our captor is a hybrid,” I said with ninety-nine percent conviction. “Captors, I’m guessing, since hybrids never work alone.”

  Were they watching us now? I glanced around the room, probing for cracks or holes in the walls and ceiling. Everything was sealed up. I wasn’t even sure how we were getting air. There was no way we were being spied on.

  “Hybrid? How can you be so sure?” He walked around me and entered the small bathroom. “Because humans don’t keep hybrid children as pets?”

  “Exactly. It’s too dangerous.” I stayed on his heels, itching with nervous energy. “Most human mothers kill their hybrid infants within days of birth. If they don’t—”

  “The child kills her.” He pinned me with a lethal glare.

  His mother had given birth to a fanged child. Whether it’d been circumstance or her own free will, she hadn’t killed him. That outcome hadn’t ended in her favor.

  Fighting the compulsion to fall into his gemstone eyes, I refocused on his chewed-up forearms. Beneath the congealing blood, the bites appeared to be closing. Regenerating like a hybrid. Like my fathers.

  Reaching around him, I cranked the shower handle on the wall. The pipes groaned and spit water from the shower head. I quickly rinsed the blood splatter off my hands, not surprised by the chill. Hot water from a ta
p required a level of engineering that was only found in organized settlements. I should’ve been resting in a place like that now, with Eddie and my fathers.

  As I turned back to Salem, I spotted two stained pieces of cardboard and empty water bottles on the floor beneath the sink. Previous meals he’d been fed?

  “How old were you when you killed your mother?” I asked.

  “Twelve.” Looming over me, he didn’t move to rinse the blood.

  “If you lasted twelve years without biting her, what happened? Did she do something to you?”

  His jaw went rigid, his gaze cryptic. If the topic of his mother was off-limits, why had he mentioned her death earlier?

  “Can you see my veins now?” He lifted his chin.

  I took in the thick column of his neck, defined shoulders, and wide chest. Standing at least eight inches taller than my five foot four frame, he was ruthlessly beautiful, every ripped inch of him commanding and seductive—the essence of pure alpha. The mystery behind what he was and what he was hiding only made him more captivating. I wanted to learn him, his body and his mind. I needed him on my side, this man who wielded such cold-blooded strength.

  I had to tilt my head back to study his throat, straining to see the vascularity beneath thick ropes of muscle in his neck and torso. I concentrated, mentally flaying his perfect skin and imagining the circulation of his blood. No matter how hard I visualized it, I couldn’t make it appear.

  “You look normal,” I said. If the definition of normal was imposing, terrifying beauty. “I know I saw something crawling through your blood, something silver and alive.”

  “Well, I can’t see it, and your ability—if we can call it that—seems flaky.” Skepticism flattened his tone. He raised a red-stained forearm and held it inches from my face. “Can you see silver things in the blood on my skin?”

  The splatter looked like drying paint, drippy at the edges with clots around the fading punctures. Having spent a lifetime immersed in bloodshed, I shouldn’t have had a reaction to it. So why was my stomach cramping? My pulse humming? Fuck, my teeth ached.