She shot him a warning look, reminding him of her demand that he not “mess” with her mind. His head tilted in acknowledgment, but he didn’t cease soothing her because he didn’t perceive that as messing with her. At least not to his way of thinking.
Lindsay caught his wrist and imagined sticking her tongue out at him, the thought entering his mind with vivid clarity. He felt a silent laugh move through him. She was so full of vitality and humor despite the many blows life had dealt her. He was so different from her, having been created to punish and imprison, to maim and kill. But she was teaching him a different way, changing him in slow degrees, bringing her light into his darkness. And he made a concerted effort to learn and grow, to be the sort of man who could bring a smile to her face and happiness to her life. Because she was his soul. Who was he if not the man who loved her beyond all reason and self-preservation?
The phone began to ring in his office. They all heard it despite the distance from where they stood and the glass patio door that closed off his workspace from the outdoors. Lindsay frowned and turned, still growing accustomed to her vampiric senses.
Adrian moved away, rounding the corner. The glass panel slid aside as he approached and he willed his wings away. They dissipated like fog in a stiff wind when he stepped inside, affording him comfortable movement as well as the ability to blend with mortals. The speakerphone was engaged by the third ring and his gaze held Lindsay’s as he settled into his chair.
“Mitchell,” he greeted the caller.
“Captain. Siobhán here.”
He leaned back in his chair, settling in. He’d tasked Siobhán with studying the disease ravaging the vampire ranks, and she had been working ceaselessly on that mission for weeks. It was she who’d inadvertently discovered that Sentinel blood cured the illness when a Sentinel working with her was bitten by one of the infected, resulting in the infected returning to a normal vampiric state. Considering the tens of thousands of vampires in North America alone and the less than two hundred Sentinels left in existence, it was information they couldn’t afford to have the vampires discover before an alternate cure was found. “How are you progressing?”
“Slowly but surely. I’ve got a dozen infected in stasis now. We can keep them alive with steady blood transfusions, but they have to stay anesthetized or they’re impossible to control.”
Adrian had seen the monstrosities in action firsthand. He knew how mindlessly violent they were. “How quickly do they lose higher brain function?”
“How far do you want me to go to find out?” she asked grimly. “They’re already infected by the time I get them. If you want a play-by-play of what happens from exposure to illness, I’ll need to deliberately infect healthy subjects.”
“Do it. Our blood is a cure, so we can reverse the damage.” It was a brutal order and one he didn’t enjoy making, but the ends justified the means. When Nikki had attacked him and nearly taken his life, she’d still been cognizant enough to speak to him coherently. How recently had she been exposed? Had she been an example of someone who’d been recently contaminated? Or someone who’d been ill for a while? “Have you been able to spot any patterns in the rapidity of progression?”
Some vamps were dead within a few days, others lasted a few weeks, and still others appeared to be immune. Why?
“I think I’m onto something in that regard.” Her excitement came through in her voice. The pixielike Sentinel was ravenous for knowledge. “I’m not entirely positive yet, but it seems as if the advancement varies depending on how far removed the minion is from the Fallen heading their vampiric hierarchy. For example, Lindsay is once removed from Syre. Her infection would advance much more slowly than a minion she Changed, who would be twice removed from Syre. And so on and so on.”
He set his elbows on the armrests and steepled his fingers together. “You need to test Fallen blood.”
“It would be helpful, yes,” she conceded, certainly knowing how difficult it would be to attain. “Then I could see if it at least slows the development of the disease.”
“I’m your best chance of getting it,” Lindsay interjected. “As a vampire myself, I’d fit right in to any location where they congregate.”
Adrian’s response was immediate. “No.”
Her brows lifted. Her amber eyes challenged him—the distinctive irises of a vampire. One who could move among the others with ease, but who was still frail in many ways. His Sentinel blood would protect her from the illness, and she knew how to fight and wouldn’t hesitate to kill, but she’d still be vulnerable and he wouldn’t be close enough to protect her. And there was the fact that while most minions would have no idea who she was, some of the Fallen did because of Syre and Shadoe. She wasn’t totally anonymous.
He couldn’t risk her, couldn’t lose her. “No,” he said again, pushing the negation into her mind for emphasis.
“Stay out of my head, angel,” she growled.
Siobhán’s melodious voice floated out of the phone’s speaker. “I’m also going to need more lycan blood.”
“Not a problem.” He had plenty cryogenically stored, for identification and genetic testing purposes. “Anything else?”
“Perhaps…” She hesitated a moment. “Perhaps other angelic blood samples. From a mal’akh or even an archangel. Preferably both. Perhaps we Sentinels aren’t the only ones who carry the cure in our veins.”
“You don’t ask for much, do you?” Adrian said drily. Even though malakhim—the lowest rank of angel in the lowest sphere—were the most numerous, getting blood from one was no easy task. “I’ll see what I can do. Keep me posted.”
“Yes, Captain. Of course.”
He hung up, his gaze never leaving Lindsay’s face. She was careful not to openly challenge him in front of his subordinates, a circumspection she’d always displayed and he had always appreciated. But she’d challenge him in private. He would never tell her how much it aroused him when she did so. He’d just continue to show her instead…
“We need a plan B, Lindsay. Work on coming up with that.”
Elijah shoved both hands through his hair, his heart pounding violently, his gaze on the woman sprawled prone on the bed. Vashti’s hair was a crimson cloud around her, the glossy strands lying sinuously atop her back and shoulders. Her face was turned toward him, her lips parted with her panting exhalations. Her clawed hands fisted the fitted sheet, and trails of tears were still visible on her pale cheeks. Not due to him, but to the nightmare she’d suffered that had woken him.
No…please…stop… Over and over in a broken litany. Whimpers and gasps of pain. Moans of agony that ripped through his vitals.
He would never forget the bloodcurdling scream that had sent him leaping from the bed as a man but landing on the floor in his lupine form.
Without his will. His beast had bypassed his control for the first time ever. For her. Because she’d cried out in distress, struggling through the throes of a nightmare.
And he’d been unable to shift back until the beast was certain she was all right. He’d paced the room, sniffing along the cracks around the door and in the corners, growling because there was no other outlet for his helpless fury but to search and find nothing to kill. Once he’d been assured that nothing in the locked room posed a threat to her, he’d padded over to the bed. He had nuzzled against the crown of her head and licked away her tears. She’d calmed then, settling back into a fitful sleep. Only then had he been capable of shifting back.
Everyone was wrong about him—he was no Alpha or he would never have shifted without conscious thought. Which meant they needed to find one who was. Quickly.
In the meantime, he was crazily attuned to Vashti. To the extreme. Their primal mating had brought on more than explosive orgasms. It had altered him and his reactions to her, eroding his control along with his goddamn common sense. He could hardly recognize himself this morning. What the fuck was the matter with him?
He was afraid he knew. Those endless moments when he’d
been bound and captured beneath her, helpless to stop her as she took his blood and his semen into her mouth, riveted by the burn of fury and ferocious desire as she sheathed his aching cock in her tight, hot depths…they’d shifted him on the inside. And when he had taken over and she’d shattered beneath him, he had accepted the surrender of such a powerful and lethal woman with a possessive surge of awe and gratitude.
Someone’s fist pounded against the door, and Elijah yanked it open, scowling at the interruption of Vashti’s rest.
“What do you want?” he snapped at Salem, who sucked up all the space in the hallway. Elijah didn’t give a shit that he was bare-assed naked. Neither did the vamp.
“Have you seen Vashti?” Salem barked back. Then his nose twitched as he scented the air. His eyes widened as he comprehended just how thoroughly Elijah had seen her.
“Yeah. Go away.”
“Where’d she go?”
“She’s sleeping. Come back later.” Elijah backed up and shut the door.
Salem stopped the latch from catching with a slap of his palm against the metal. “Sleeping?”
“You know. Eyes closed. Lack of consciousness. Sound familiar? Go away.”
Salem pushed to widen the opening. “Move aside, lycan.”
Bored with the conversation and still aggravated by Vash’s nightmare, Elijah stepped out to the hallway and shut the door carefully behind him. Then he shoved the vampire across the hall and into the opposite doorway, which Salem busted through to slide into the foot of a heavily occupied bed. Elijah got a glimpse of enough bare limbs and arched necks to make up at least four bodies.
Salem was up and in Elijah’s face in a split-second. “You’re pissing me off, dog. Vash doesn’t sleep.”
“She does when she’s tired.”
Amber eyes glowing, Salem’s voice lowered ominously. “What did you do to her?”
“Really?” Elijah asked drily. “That’s none of your damn business.”
“If you hurt her—”
Elijah laughed at that, a sound with little humor in it. He’d been chained and assaulted, and the vamp was worried about Vash. “She can take of herself.”
Salem stared him down. Elijah yawned.
“She hasn’t slept in decades,” the vamp said finally.
“Well, that might explain why she’s so bitchy.” Elijah’s voice changed, lowered. “But then bitchy is preferable to broken.”
The vamp’s jaw tightened.
“What happened to her, Salem?”
“Ask her yourself, lycan.” Salem’s mouth curved with mocking cruelty. “Until she tells you that, you’ve got nothing but sex with her. You’re just a dick with stamina.”
Elijah was a second away from slamming his fist in the vamp’s taunting face when Salem turned and stepped back into the room he’d crashed into, lifting the warped door off the ground and popping it into the frame with himself inside.
It took Elijah a few minutes and several deep breaths to rein in his volatile mood enough to return to the room he shared with Vash. He pushed the door open slowly and just wide enough for him to slide in. What he saw inside froze him.
Vashti sat on the edge of the mattress, his shirt in her fisted hands and pressed to her nose. She jerked guiltily when he came in, as if she’d been caught doing something she shouldn’t. Her hands dropped into her lap, baring her gorgeous tits.
She stood in an agitated rush. “What time is it? We should get going.”
“It’s a little after seven.” He didn’t need a watch to tell him that. His circadian rhythm was instinctively set by the moon, wherever in the world he was, courtesy of the werewolf blood in his lineage. He approached her cautiously, as if nearing a skittish animal.
Her eyes were huge in her face, and even in the dark room they were shadowed. The stench of fear and pain still clung to her skin, which might have been why she’d buried her nose in his scent instead. Or maybe she just craved it, as he craved hers. He could struggle with that craving, even hate himself for it, but he’d learned that ignoring it was too dangerous, leaving him too off-balance and unstable to control himself as he needed to. He was a creature of instinct and she called to that primal part of him in a way he couldn’t afford to ignore or marginalize.
“We’re already late getting back,” she said, attempting to turn away as if to reach for her clothes.
He caught her with a gentle but firm grip on her elbow. The feel of her skin against his fingertips was like satin, and a powerful jolt shot through him. “Come here.”
“Elijah—”
Tugging her closer, he gripped her nape and pulled her face into the crook of his neck, where he knew his scent would be concentrated. She inhaled sharply, then sighed. A heartbeat later she was nuzzling her face into his skin, her lips feathering over his rapidly elevating pulse. He wondered if she knew how much pleasure her gesture gave a lycan, then decided she didn’t, which was for the best. She didn’t need to have any more ammunition to use against him.
Closing his eyes, he absorbed the feeling of her lushness pressed against him and the blessed lack of tension between them. Her height was just right and her curves molded into his harder frame as if they were two halves of a whole. A perfect fit…with the absolute wrong woman. “What do you dream about, Vashti?”
She stiffened and tried to pull away, but he’d anticipated that and held tight.
“Let me go,” she said crossly.
“Not gonna happen.”
“I could make you.”
His hand fisted in her hair, pulling her head back to look into his eyes. “You can ask me nicely and I’ll think about it.”
“Fuck you.”
“Well, that’s not a very nice way to ask, but okay.”
A laugh escaped her and was quickly stifled, but it was breathtaking while it lasted. Deep and husky, it was rusty, but as full-bodied as she was.
He scooped her up and set one knee on the mattress, then the other, until he reached the center, where he laid her out. Joining her, he stretched out along his side and propped his head in his hand. He laid the other on her taut, smooth stomach with his fingers splayed, holding her down without pressure while also anchoring her for his questions.
“Who hurt you, Vashti?”
She shook her head. “It’s none of your business.”
“Sure it is. I can’t kill them if I don’t know who they are.”
“It’s not your problem.”
“The hell it isn’t.”
“We screwed around once. Don’t make anything out of it.”
“Actually”—he grinned—“it was more like a dozen screws. Give or take a few.”
“Leave it alone, puppy.”
“Can’t do that.”
Her gaze narrowed. “Shit. You’re a fuckin’ Boy Scout, aren’t you? Saving the world one problem at a time.”
“I’m helping you find the ones who killed your mate, but you won’t trust me with those who hurt you? Do I get to you in some way, Vash?” he goaded. “Do I make you feel vulnerable?”
“You flatter yourself.”
“So put me in my place.”
Vash took a deep breath, her muscular abdomen lifting into his palm. “Syre took care of it.”
“Took care of what?”
“I don’t want to talk about it, Elijah. It’s done and over with. Ancient history.”
“You’re gonna tell me.” He lifted his hand to her mouth, running his thumb across her bottom lip. He slid it inside when she started to protest. “Maybe not today, but soon.”
He groaned when she sucked on his finger, her bottom teeth scoring over the pad. His cock lengthened and thickened, remembering what it felt like to have her mouth on him. She’d taken from him by force what he would’ve given her willingly, but the pleasure had been there nevertheless, his hunger for her so sharp he’d wanted her however he could have her. But what he really needed was to be gentle with her and she needed that tenderness, even though she fought so damned har
d against it. Fought enough for both of them.
He parted her lips with a gentle downward press of his thumb and bent his head to lick teasingly inside, barely enough for her to feel him. As badly as he’d wanted to devour her in the parking lot the night before, he wanted something softer and sweeter now.
Her hand wrapped around his wrist. “We don’t have time for this. We’ve got a lot to get done.”
Cupping her cheek, he took her mouth in a deep, wet kiss. He kept the pace slow when she tried to speed it up, resisting giving her the swift plunges of his tongue that she begged for with her plaintive whimpers and heated enthusiasm. Instead he stroked and he licked. His lips moved softly against hers.
She gasped, slinging one long, lean leg over his hip. “Stop playing with me.”
Elijah rolled over her and pinned her down. Linking their fingers, he restrained her hands on either side of her head. “We need to play, Vashti. I need to. After this last week…the last fucking month, really.”
She stared up at him, looking younger and more fragile than he’d ever seen her. She was ageless, a fallen angel who’d existed for millennia. She’d killed countless beings, some viciously, as she had Micah, and she would kill countless more. And yet she was soft and lax in his arms, warm and open, exposed for a moment due to a nightmare she’d avoided facing for decades. He wondered if he would ever have her like this again or if she would always be as she’d been last night, brutally determined to objectify him.
And he wondered why he gave a shit either way when he was going to kill her.
“You like me,” he murmured, sliding his tongue along her bottom lip, which was plump and swollen from his kisses.
“I want you. There’s a difference.”