She felt cool air at her back as she edged out the open door and into the night.
Then she pivoted and bolted, before the first hot tears began to flood her cheeks.
CHAPTER 15
“Savannah.”
Gideon jolted back to wakefulness on a shout, his sole concern, his every cell, honed in on a single thought...her.
He sat up and felt the sharp stab of pain answer from all over his body, the worst of it coming from the deep gash in his thigh. He was in a bed. Lying in the Order’s infirmary. He breathed in, and didn’t smell any of the ash or sweat or blood that had crusted every square inch of him following his ordeal at the Minion’s house. Someone had gone to the trouble of cleaning him up after patching him back together.
“What time is it?” he murmured out loud. How long had he been unconscious? “Ah, shit. What day is it?”
“It’s okay, Gideon. Relax.” A gentle female hand settled on his bare shoulder. “You’re okay. Tegan brought you back to the compound last night.”
Last night.
“Danika,” he rasped, peeling his eyes open to look up at Conlan’s Breedmate, who stood beside him, a roll of white gauze bandages in her hand. “Where is she? Where’s Savannah?”
The tall blonde gave a sympathetic shake of her head. “I’m sorry, I don’t know.”
Damn it. Gideon threw off the sheet and swung his legs around to the side of the bed, ignoring the hot, spearing complaint of his wounds. “I need to see her. I need to find her. Keaton’s Master is still out there somewhere. She’s not safe--”
“She’s gone, man.” Tegan stood at the threshold of the infirmary room. His face was grim, barely an acknowledgment as Danika quietly slipped out and left the two warriors alone. “My fault, Gideon. I didn’t know--”
“What happened?” A spike of adrenaline and dread shot into his veins. “What did you do to her?”
“Told her the truth. Which is apparently more than you’d done.”
“Ah, fuck.” Gideon raked a hand through his hair. “Fuck me. What did you tell her, T?”
A vague shrug, although his green eyes stayed unreadable. “That she’s been your personal obsession since you saw her on that newscast the day of the attack at the university.”
Gideon groaned. “Shit.”
“Yeah, she wasn’t exactly happy to hear that.”
“I have to go to her. She could be in danger, Tegan. I need to find her and make sure she’s all right. I have to make sure she knows that I love her. That I need her.”
“You’re not in any condition to leave the compound.”
“Fuck that.” Gideon heaved onto his feet, grimacing at the agony of his wounded leg, but not about to let something as trivial as a recently severed femoral artery keep him from going after the woman he loved. “She’s mine. She belongs with me. I’m going to tell her that, and then I’m going to bring her back.”
Tegan grunted. “Kind of figured you might say that. And I’m way ahead of you, my man--for once, maybe. Got the Order’s charter jet on standby, fueled up and waiting for you at the private hangar. You just need to tell the pilots where you want to go.”
“Louisiana,” he murmured. “She’ll have gone home to Louisiana.”
Tegan tossed him a stack of fresh clothing that had been set next to the bed. “What are you waiting for, then? Get the fuck outta here.”
~ ~ ~
With the thick shadows of the Atchafalaya swamp looming up ahead, Gideon hopped off the back of the old pickup truck he’d hitched a ride on outside the Baton Rouge airport. His leg wound ached like a son of a bitch with every mile he ran, deeper into the dense vegetation and drooping, moss-laden cypress trees of the basin.
Savannah’s sister, Amelie, lived on a remote road in this sparsely populated stretch of marshlands. Gideon knew precisely where to find her; after waking in the infirmary, he’d lingered at the Order’s compound only long enough to run a quick hack on the IRS databases, which coughed up her address in no time at all.
He crept off an unpaved road to stalk up on the modest, gray-shingled house with its covered porch and soft-glowing light in the windows. There were no cars in the unpaved driveway out front. No sound coming from within the small abode as he stole toward it.
He climbed up the squat steps leading to the porch and front door, his thigh muscle protesting each flex and movement. His talent reached past the thin walls of the house, searching for telltale life energy. Someone sat in the living room, alone.
Gideon knocked on the front door--only to discover it wasn’t closed all the way.
“Savannah?”
A muffled groan answered from inside.
“Savannah!” Gideon had his gun in his hand now, storming into the place, his body filled with alarm.
It wasn’t Savannah. Her sister, no doubt. The early middle-aged black woman was bound and gagged on a kitchen chair in the center of the living room. Evidence of a scuffle were all around her, toppled furniture, broken knick-knacks.
But no sign of Savannah.
Amelie Dupree’s eyes went wide as Gideon approached her with the pistol gripped in his fist. She screamed through the gag, started to flail in panic on the chair.
“Shh,” Gideon soothed, working past his terror for what might have happened to Savannah. He tore Amelie’s bonds loose and freed the cloth from around her face and mouth. “I’m not going to hurt you. Where’s Savannah? I’m here to protect her.”
“They took her!”
Gideon’s blood ran cold. “Who took her?”
“I don’t know.” She shook her head, a sob cracking in her throat. “Couple of men came here, showed up about an hour ago. Tied me up and they took my baby sister away at gunpoint.”
Gideon’s growl of rage was animalistic, lethal. “Where did they take her? What did these men look like?”
Amelie sagged forward, her head in her hands. “I don’t know, I don’t know! Oh, God, somebody gotta help her. I gotta call the police!”
Gideon took the woman’s shoulders in a firm grasp, compelling her to look at him. “Listen to me, Amelie. You have to stay put, call no one. You have to trust me. I’m not going to let anything happen to Savannah.”
She stared at him, doubt swimming in her anguished eyes. “Are you the one? Are you the one who broke her heart back there in Boston, sent her back here last night like her whole world was falling apart?”
He didn’t answer to that, even though the blame settled heavily on him. “I’m the one who loves her. More than life itself.”
“Don’t let them hurt her,” she cried. “Don’t let those men kill my sweet Savannah.”
Gideon gave a solemn shake of his head. “I won’t. I swear my life on that.”
No sooner had he said it, a vehicle approached, pulling up alongside the house outside. The dull rumble of the engine went silent, followed by the crisp thump of two car doors closing a moment later.
Gideon lifted his head, every battle instinct coming alive inside him. He whirled around to head out the front door, his gun at the ready.
There she was.
Standing on her sister’s front lawn in the darkness, caught in a headlock by a human man--a Minion, Gideon realized at once. The big thug held the nose of his pistol jammed up against Savannah’s temple. She’d been crying, her face streaked with tears, lips ashen from terror.
All the blood rushed out of Gideon’s head, started pounding hard in the center of his chest.
It was then he noticed the second man, a Breed male, standing at ease in the shadows of a cypress tree nearby. He was dressed in a tailored navy wool overcoat, his brown hair impeccably cut, and swept back elegantly from his face. Held in a loose grasp in front of him stood a gleaming length of polished steel. The long blade glittered in the moonlight.
Gideon didn’t need to see the hilt to know there would be a bird of prey--a falcon--tooled into the handcrafted grip.
Hugh Faulkner’s blade.
But this was not the
Gen One sword smith Gideon killed back in London all those centuries ago. He’d never seen this vampire before, he was certain.
“Drop your weapons, warrior.”
Gideon glanced from the Breed male to the Minion holding Savannah, calculating which of the two he should kill first to give her the best odds of getting away unharmed. Neither was a guarantee, and he was loath to risk making a mistake that carried such a high cost.
“Put them down now,” the vampire drawled. “Or my man will blow her pretty head off.”
Gideon relaxed his hold on the pistol, then stooped to set it down.
“All of them. Slowly.”
He took off his weapons belt and put it on the ground at his feet. The bandaged gash on his thigh was bleeding again, seeping through his pant leg.
The other vampire sniffed the air dramatically, lips peeling back in an amused smirk. “Not so untouchable, after all.”
Gideon watched the Breed male turn Faulkner’s sword on its tip in the moist earth of Amelie Dupree’s front yard. “Do I know you?”
The vampire chuckled. “No one did. Not back then.”
Gideon tried to place him, tried to figure out if, or when, their paths might have crossed.
“You wouldn’t have noticed me. He hardly did, either.” There was an acid resentment in the tone, but something else too. An old, bitter hurt. “His unacknowledged bastard. The only kin he had.”
Gideon narrowed his gaze on the other male. “Hugh Faulkner had a son?”
A thin, hate-filled smile stretched the polished facade of his face into an ugly sneer. “A teenage son who watched him die at your hand, slaughtered in the open with less regard than might be shown common swine. A son who vowed to avenge him, even thought he had no use for me in life.” Hugh Faulkner’s bastard smiled a true smile now. “A son who decided to take from my father’s killer the only family he had left too.”
Gideon bristled, fury spiking in his veins. “My brothers were innocent children. You arranged for those three Rogues to go in and murder them?”
“I thought it would be enough,” he replied evenly. “I thought it would settle the score. And it did, for a long time. Even after I came to America to begin a new life under a new name. A name I built into something prestigious, something respectable: Cyril Smithson.”
Gideon vaguely recalled the name from among those of the Darkhaven elite. A wealthy, socially important name. One that could be destroyed within the Breed’s civilian circles, if word of its patriarch’s ignoble, murderous past were to come to light.
“Knowing I took your last living kin might have been enough, even after I found myself in Boston and watched you carrying out your missions as one of the Order,” Smithson went on. “But then my do-gooder Breedmate foolishly donated some of my private things to the university, including my father’s sword. When I went to retrieve it, Keaton was in his office pounding into a young slut. She saw me and screamed.” The Breed male clucked his tongue. “Well, I couldn’t be blamed for what happened next. The girl saw my fangs, my eyes.”
“So you killed her too,” Gideon said.
Smithson shrugged. “She had to be dealt with. Her roommate, here too.”
Gideon followed the vampire’s glance toward Savannah. She was breathing hard, breast rising and falling rapidly in her fear. Her eyes locked on to Gideon’s, pleading, praying.
Smithson spun the sword idly with his fingers. “This blade was never supposed to leave my possession after the Rogues brought it to me with your brothers’ blood on it. You were never supposed to know the truth of what happened that night. Now that you do...well, I suppose it’s all come back around to the beginning again, hasn’t it?”
The vampire lifted the sword, testing its weight. “I’d never been much good with blades. Crude weapons, really. But effective.”
“What do you want, Smithson? A contest to the death with me, here and now?”
“Yes.” He met Gideon’s seething gaze across the yard. “Yes, that’s precisely what I want. But I won’t underestimate you the way my father did.”
He slanted a look at his Minion. Two shots rang out in rapid succession, a bullet for each of Gideon’s shoulders.
Savannah screamed. She struggled in her captor’s hold now, her eyes tearing up as she looked at Gideon and the barrel of the Minion’s pistol came back to her temple.
He barely felt the pain of the new wounds. His focus was rooted wholly on her, and on the wild, desperate expression in her gaze. He gave a faint shake of his head, unspoken command that she not do anything to risk her own life.
“That ought to level the playing field,” Smithson remarked as the gunshots continued to echo through the bayou. “On second thought, another for good measure,” he told his Minion. “The gut this time.”
The Minion’s hand started to move away from Savannah’s head. Gideon saw it in agonizing slow motion--the twitch of muscle as the human’s wrist began to pivot from its primary target to the new one at his Master’s command.
Savannah, no!
Gideon didn’t even have time to bring the words to his tongue. She seized the opportunity to shift her weight as the Minion’s attention flicked away from her. Savannah knocked the man’s arm up, just as he pulled the trigger. The shot went wild, up into the trees, and Savannah broke loose of the Minion’s hold.
“Kill her,” Smithson ordered.
And in one awful, shattering instant, another bullet blasted out of the Minion’s gun. It hit her in the back. Dropped her like dead weight to the ground.
Amelie shrieked and flew off the porch behind him to race to her sister’s side.
Gideon roared. Horror and rage bled through him, cold and black and acrid. “No!” he howled, racked with an anguish unlike any he’d ever known. “No!”
He leapt on Smithson, took him down in a hard crash to the ground.
He pounded and beat him, the pair of vampires rolling around in a savage hand-to-hand struggle in the wet grass. Gideon was vaguely aware of the Minion racing toward them, the barrel of his pistol aimed down at the scuffle, but hesitant to shoot and inadvertently snuff his own maker.
Gideon ignored the threat and kept up his punishment of Smithson. They tore at each other, gnashing with fangs and teeth as they wrestled on the ground. Gideon’s fury was a hungry beast, waiting for the chance to deal the final blow.
When Smithson turned his head to reach for his lost blade, Gideon pounced with lethal purpose. He grabbed hold of the other male’s throat with his teeth and fangs, sinking them deep.
He bit down hard into Smithson’s neck, ripping out flesh and larynx in one savage shake of his head.
Smithson jerked and flailed in agony, blood spurting everywhere.
His Minion stood in stunned silence, a brief hesitation that was all the time Gideon needed to finish them both in one strike.
He picked up Faulkner’s sword and drove it into Smithson’s chest.
The vampire convulsed around the blade, eyes going wide and bulging in their sockets.
Gideon heard another round of gunfire somewhere close to him. Felt a sudden, hard knock in the side of his skull, before his vision began to fill with red. Blood. His blood, pouring into his eyes from the hole now bored into his skull from the Minion’s final shot.
Smithson’s chest rattled with a wet, gurgling breath as death took him under. His Minion dropped lifeless to the ground at the same time, the mind slave’s life tied inexorably to his Master’s.
“Savannah.” Gideon dragged himself over to where Amelie hovered at her side. Savannah wasn’t moving. Her back was covered in blood. The gunshot wound a dark hole burned through her pale gray sweater, up near her ribs.
“She’s dying!” Amelie wailed, not looking at him, but focused completely on her sister. She petted Savannah with trembling hands, her face stricken with sorrow. “You promised to save her. You swore on your life.”
“Move aside,” he rasped thickly, his voice unearthly, ragged from injury and angui
sh and the crowding presence of his fangs, which filled his mouth. “Let me help her.”
It was only then that Amelie turned to look at him. She sucked in a sharp breath and recoiled. She scrabbled backward with Savannah held close to her as if she thought she could protect her from the monster, bleeding and hideously transformed from the man he’d been just a few minutes ago. “Oh, my God. What kind of devil’s spawn are you?”
“Please,” Gideon hissed. His vision was fading, his pulse hammering heavily in his temples, bringing excruciating pain to his skull. He had to act quickly. There wasn’t much time to do what was needed before one or the other of them died. He reached for Savannah’s hand, gently took her limp form out of Amelie’s grasp. “Please, it’s the only way. Trust me in this. Let me save her.”
He didn’t wait. Couldn’t let another second tick by without feeding the power of his blood to Savannah’s wounds.
He bit into his wrist and held the opened vein over her parted lips.
“Drink,” he whispered thickly. “Please, baby...drink for me.”
Deep red droplets splashed down into her slack mouth. The stream picked up speed, pulsing out of him with every labored beat of his heart. “Come on, Savannah. Do it. Please take this gift from me. It’s all I have to give you now.”
Her tongue began to flick softly. Her slender throat began to work, taking the first swallow from his vein. She drank again, then another. Her eyelids started to lift slightly, just a hint of response, but enough to wring a sigh of naked relief out of Gideon’s chest.
She would survive.
He felt it with a certainty that humbled him. His blood would save her.
She was alive. Smithson was dead, unable to harm her.
Gideon had kept his promise to her, after all.
His vision faded from dull gray to black, a numbness creeping over his scalp. He had to struggle to remain upright, invisible tethers dragging him down.
He fought the heavy pull of his injury and cradled Savannah’s head in his arm, centering himself with the steady rhythm of her mouth working softly at his wrist, drinking from him, healing because of him.