by Pam Godwin
My heart jumped with excitement. “Is this—?”
“The Yukon River? Yes.” He pointed north at a fuzzy mountain peak against the paling gray skyline. “If that’s Midnight Dome, we’re just south of old Dawson City.”
My mind darted to images of the map I’d studied for months. We were farther north than I’d thought, but I knew how to make it back to camp from here. Only a five-day walk. A grin spread across my face.
He turned me toward the steep rocky bluff that towered over the opposite shore of the river. “There’s a cave in there. See it?”
The limestone karst was a majestic depiction of erosion by wind, ice, and water. Shadows clung to the porous ridges and jutting overhangs, but the angle of the moonlight revealed a skinny crack in the rock-ribbed veneer. If the river hadn’t been frozen, it wouldn’t have been accessible.
He tested the surface of the ice with a stomp of his boot. “It’s at least a foot thick. Should be safe to walk on.” He speared another glance at the eastern horizon.
Given the fading hues of the sky, the sun would rise any minute and illuminate a snow-glazed landscape blotted with spruce trees and divided by the frozen river. A river that would lead me southeast, directly back to camp. A flutter lifted my chest.
“I’m going to cross first,” he said. “When I make it halfway, follow my path.”
As he ventured out on the ice, I gathered four flat stones and stacked three of them on the shore where he entered. I placed the fourth stone beside the pile at a one o’clock position—the direction of the cave.
“Dawn! Move your ass.” He stood at the center of the river, tall and fierce beneath the heavy weight of the backpack.
“Will your cannibal club put a hole through the ice?” I strode across the surface, aided by the grippy soles of my boots. “We could do some ice fishing.”
He wove his hand around mine and led me to the cliff. “I’m better at hunting beaver.”
“Was that an innuendo?”
“No.” He huffed a laugh. “Trapping a beaver is a helluva lot easier than spearing fish.”
“Beavers don’t like to be trapped.”
He shook his head, grinning at me. “That’s an innuendo.”
I lifted a shoulder, sharing his smile.
Up ahead, the craggy flank of the cliff gave way to a fissure and hopefully, a cave within. He crouched down and ducked his head inside the two-foot wide crack.
“Salem.” I pulled on our laced fingers. “What if an ice bear lives in there?”
“Then we eat it.” He shrugged off the backpack, removed a kerosene lantern, and lit it with a built-in striker.
I stared, wide-eyed and impressed. What else did he have in that pack?
“What?” He looked at the lamp and back at me. “I make my own kerosene with oil shale and—”
“I do, too, but you seem to have an endless supply of handy stuff. It’s curious, that’s all.”
“I live in this terrain, remember? I also knew that tracking you—”
“Stalking.”
“Tracking—”
“Trapping beaver.” I pinned my lips together, fighting laughter.
“Fuck.” He broke first, laughing and rubbing his head. “You win. I knew that stalking and trapping beaver wouldn’t be a weekend trip. I set out with a season’s worth of supplies.”
“All right, you dirty boy scout.” I nodded at the cave. “Carry on.”
Rather than crawling through the crack, he rose to his full height and tugged me against his chest.
“I’ve been meaning to tell you.” He kissed the corner of my mouth. “Your fangs”—a kiss on the other corner—“are sexy as fuck.”
When he leaned back, an invasion of frostbitten air rushed over my lips. I wanted his mouth back. And his hands, his teeth, his cock… I wanted all of him joined with all of me in a warm cocoon of bliss.
“You’re not afraid I’ll bite you?” I reached out and fidgeted with a button on his leather coat.
“I recognize the levels of bloodlust. Right now, your body needs sleep and food.”
He turned back to the crevice and ducked inside, pulling me along with a grip on my hand. The dusky glow of the lamp guided us through the narrow opening and into a yawning space the diameter of our concrete prison in the mansion. I buckled my mother’s dagger on my hip and turned in a circle.
The limestone walls percolated with moisture. Soft white minerals formed drippy deposits on the low ceiling, and an abandoned fire pit sat next to the narrow entrance.
Setting the lantern on the floor in the center of the space, he squatted beside the pile of petrified wood and picked through the ash and timber.
I folded my arms across my chest to ward off the chill. “Do you think someone stays here?”
“In the old world, troglodytes inhabited this area. I suspect they all mutated or died twenty years ago.”
“Troglodytes?”
“Shaggy beards. Anti-modernization. Mushroom-picking, cave-dwelling hermits.”
“Sounds lonely.”
“There’s freedom in the wilderness, right?”
“Is that what you think?” I longed for civilized society, surrounded by growing families and people I could depend on.
“No.” He brushed his hands together and stood with his head lowered to avoid a bump on the ceiling. “I appreciate the finer things in life.”
There was a wealth of knowledge to pull from that statement, but I had more important things to focus on. “Let’s get a fire going. We need to go catch something to eat.”
“The wood is too wet.” He stared at the pale band of light on the rocky floor of the cave opening. “I can’t use it for a fire.”
“Okay, well, we have daylight now. Grab your hunting knife.” I strode toward the crevice that led outside. “There’s plenty of firewood around here. And I need some hardwoods and fletching to make arrows.”
“Wait.” He grabbed my arm and yanked me toward the rear of the cave. “You’re not going out there without me.”
“I wasn’t. I thought…” I narrowed my eyes at the strange look on his face. “What’s wrong with you?”
He stepped back, planting his boots in a wide stance, as if to block my escape.
“What are you doing?” I didn’t like the sudden rigidness in his posture.
“Before our captors brought you in…” He squared his shoulders and gestured at the floor. “Sit down.”
“I don’t want to sit down.” My nerves were fraying, every part of me desperate to hear the rest of that sentence. “Keep talking.”
“They aimed a tranquilizer gun through the crack in the door, but before they fired it, a male voice spoke to me.” His jaw tensed in the glimmer of the lantern. “He said, ‘Fuck the daughter of Eve and you’ll be freed.’”
Anger spiked through my veins, and my hands fisted at my sides. “That’s why you—?”
“No! Listen.” He raked a hand through his hair. “At first, yeah, I wanted to fuck your hot little body and collect my get out of jail free card. But within hours, you changed everything.”
“I don’t understand.” My stomach knotted, my voice sharp and ugly. “What did I do exactly?”
“You…glowed. Intensely and brightly. I thought it was your eyes bewitching me, but it’s you. Your inner strength, remarkable beauty, sassy comebacks—the whole fucking package.” He stepped closer, pausing within arm’s reach. “You made me care about you. Fucking you in exchange for freedom no longer mattered. You mattered, and I wanted you on my terms, when you trusted me enough to want me in return.”
As I absorbed his words, I shifted to put space between us. He moved in, pressed my back against the wall, and framed my face with gloved hands.
My fists relaxed, and my breathing slipped into a defeated rhythm. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
He touched his brow to mine. “I didn’t want you to give me your virginity for any other reason than because you wanted to.”
I
understood that, but the omission still left a vexing burn. “What was your plan after you notified our captors that you fucked the crazy bitch? The deal was they would free you, right?”
He lowered his hands to my waist and squeezed. “I intended to throw you over my shoulder and fight our way out.”
“By taking a tranquilizer dart in the back?” I arched a brow.
“I didn’t know what kind of gun it was.” His nostrils flared, and his eyes burned silver. “I acted on instinct. If you’d been shot with a bullet—”
I pressed my fingers against his lips. “Fair enough.”
We could talk circles around would’ves, could’ves, should’ves, but we’d end up in the same place—cold, tired, and hungry. I didn’t know if I believed him. I didn’t know why our captors wanted him to have sex with me. We’d played into some mindfuck game that I couldn’t begin to figure out with an exhausted brain.
Right now, we were alive, and we would stay that way if we found food and remained focused. We had four, maybe five hours of daylight to catch something to eat, and I would need every one of those hours to find a breathing carcass in this wasteland, as well as the supplies to fashion enough arrows to last me the five-day walk back to camp.
I ducked around him and headed for the mouth of the cave. “Unless you have any other omissions you’d like to share, let’s go foraging.”
“I can’t.” The guttural growl in his voice stopped me in my tracks.
“Why not?” I turned around.
He was crouched in the deepest part of the cave, forearms resting on his thighs, head lowered, and metallic eyes cutting through the dark. “I can’t go outside.”
“What? You were just out there. You’re not making any sense.”
His gaze shifted to the ground behind me. I pivoted, searching the sunlit rock floor for clues. Then it hit me.
Pale, luminous complexion. No creases around his eyes. No blemishes. No freckles. As if he’d never seen the sun.
“Sunlight,” I whispered. “You can’t be in the sun?” I spun back. “Are you allergic?”
“Something like that.”
“How bad? What happens?”
Did he get a burn? A rash? Did his skin swell up?
He rose in a fluid motion and prowled toward me, sliding a glove off one hand. When he reached the band of light striping the threshold of the cave, he veered around it and lowered on his haunches behind the wall of the opening, his entire body blanketed in shadows.
I clutched my throat, warring with the urge to tell him he didn’t have to prove anything. But selfish curiosity held my voice hostage.
His face tilted downward as he flexed his gloveless hand. Then he stretched out his arm and held his fingers in the light.
Blisters bubbled, dried, and cracked like parched earth in a fraction of a second. He hissed past clenched fangs as his skin sizzled and smoldered in wisps of smoke, shriveling, baking, and dissolving to ash over bone.
“Salem!” I screamed in horror, my stomach hardening into ice. “Stop!”
The exposed muscle in his fingers flexed as he curled them into a fist. He yanked his hand back, tucked it to his chest, and lifted electric eyes etched with pain. “This is why I killed Elaine.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
A swamping wave of denial and confusion crashed into me. Sunlight turns him to ash. I felt a pressing need to sit down before I fell down. He’s trapped in eternal darkness. My legs gave out as I plopped hard to the ground and dropped my throbbing head in my hands.
This is why he killed Elaine?
Heavy black boots appeared beneath my face, inches from the sunlit opening of the cave. I lifted my head.
Salem held his charred hand behind his back. The other he offered to me, palm up and concealed in leather. “Come sit with me in the dark.”
The pain had retreated from his eyes, and in its place was crystal-sharp vigilance. Did he think I would run? That I was afraid of him?
His expression was carved in stone, his body dangerously still, as if he were braced to chase me—directly into the sun if it came to that.
I clutched his gloved fingers and stood. “I’m not running from you.”
“Nor am I running from you.” He glanced at my fangs.
Good grief. He still thought I was going to bite him? Then what? That I’d kill him with my inexperienced bloodlust? I pressed my lips together and steeled my spine. We had a lot of shit to talk about.
Leading me to the darkest corner of the cave, he released my hand to snag the backpack and club. Then he sat with his back to the wall and pulled me onto his lap.
His leather coat and trousers creaked as I set my bow aside and settled against his rock-hard body. Despite the layers of clothes between us, I felt his warmth and strength everywhere, the image of his nude physique forever branded in my mind. He must’ve spent an absurd amount of time building those powerful shoulders, curved biceps, and V-shaped abs. There wasn’t an ounce of fat beneath all that rippling muscle. He was inconceivably gorgeous, formidable and agile, with the stamina of a horse. Yet something as essential and benign as the sun reduced him to ash.
“Let me see your hand,” I said softly, reclining against his chest.
“It’ll heal.”
I removed my borrowed fur gloves and held out my palm.
He drew in a breath and rested his wrist in my hand. The lantern bathed his raw bubbly skin in a deathly glow. Though the tissues were rapidly stitching back together, it must’ve been excruciating to endure. I stole a glance over my shoulder and found his eyes closed, brows pinched, and his head tipped back against the wall.
This is why I killed Elaine.
“You blame her for this?” I balanced his forearm on my knee, preventing his delicate flesh from bumping anything.
“Elaine? No. The Drone made me what I am when he injected her pregnant body with his experimental venom. I ki—”
“Wait. He injected her with something other than his bite?” My stomach cramped. Whether it was nerves or hunger, I pretended to ignore it.
“Elaine let him do whatever he wanted to her. She hoped to give him a perfectly engineered child, the Prince of his chosen race. The Drone died before I was born, but she still hoped.” He made a fist, stretching the newly formed skin across his knuckles. “The brainwashed cunt was disappointed the first time she took me into the sun. I’m surprised she didn’t just let me disintegrate and toss my ashes into the wind. But then she wouldn’t have been able to use my condition as punishment over the next twelve years.”
My breath caught. “What do you mean?”
“We lived all over North America, moving from place to place.”
Running from my father? Michio had searched for her for years, driven by revenge. But it was as if she’d vanished from the earth.
“She hated that we could only travel at night,” he said. “It was inconvenient that we could only bunker down in dark places. She hated me for that. Hated that my weakness made me imperfect. Whenever I misbehaved… Hell, even when I didn’t, she shoved me outside and held me in the sun long enough to ensure I felt her resentment down to my bones. Literally.”
I covered my mouth, and a knot of anguish coiled in my gut.
“During one of those punishments,” he said quietly, “I tore out her throat.”
Twisting on his lap, I straddled his hips and cupped his strong neck. “I hope she suffered.”
He touched his lips to mine so very lightly. The tender caress was fangs in the heart, desperately feeding from my soul. It was painful and beautiful and poignant.
“Our captors could’ve dumped you in daylight.” I rested my forehead against his.
“They could’ve killed you while I was drugged.”
“They could’ve sniffed my panties.” I pursed my lips.
“They better not have—”
“Maybe they sniffed yours?”
His shoulders twitched beneath my hands, and a moment later, a gorgeous grin cracked h
is face.
I traced the sensual curve of his mouth. “Come back to my camp with me. Michio’s there, and he might be able to—” I stopped myself before I made promises I couldn’t keep. “He can run some genetic tests. Maybe there’s something…I don’t know. Before the virus, he worked in a lab with the Drone. They were close once and knew the intricacies of each other’s work. Maybe he can explain your reaction to sunlight?”
“You’re asking me to enter the domain of the great warriors after I deflowered their precious daughter?” He laughed mirthlessly. “They’ll castrate me.”
“They’d have to get through me first.”
“Fierce.” He stroked a thumb across my cheek.
“Stubborn. I’m not ready to let you go.”
“Good thing, because I have no intention of letting you go.”
“Stalker,” I whispered against his lips.
The fingers caressing my face felt soft and warm and…healed. I clutched his wrist and held it in the lamp light. Pristine, porcelain skin wrapped his large muscled hand, tipped with perfectly trimmed nails. Incredible.
“That was fast.” I laced our fingers together and met his eyes. “How much sun exposure can you withstand before…”
“It only takes seconds to burn past muscle and bone and reach my organs.” He stared at our hands, expression unreadable. “There were times when I was younger…it took weeks to heal my insides. I didn’t think I’d survive those injuries. My worst incident was from five of the most grueling seconds of my life. One glance at the sunrise and…” He closed his eyes, his brow rutted with pain.
“You’ve never seen the sun.” My heart ached.
His eyes opened and roamed over my hair. “I imagine it looks a lot like this.” Lifting a fiery lock, he tenderly stroked the strands. “And this.” He traced a finger around one of my eyes and lingered on the outer corner. “My Dawn.”
Your eyes are addictive…so blinding and painful it’s like staring into a lost sunrise after twenty years of darkness.
The words he’d spoken right before my first kiss hit me with stunning impact. I wanted to warm him with my mouth and give him a breath of light in his cold, dismal world. But what if I accidentally bit him? Would he even take the chance? My chest clenched at the thought of never kissing him again.
