“I like you.”
Vash turned her head away from his mouth. “Don’t.”
“Trust me, I wish I didn’t.” He settled comfortably in the cradle of her thighs. “You shouldn’t be afraid of liking me. I won’t use it against you, except when I need my cock in you. You’ll like that, too, once I show you how it’s really going to be between us, without all the bullshit you pulled last night.” He nuzzled his nose between her breasts, breathing in her luscious scent now mingled with his own. “There’s no chance that us liking each other will change our agreement. You like that about me, too—that I keep my word.”
Her hands lifted to his waist and he hummed his approval. He was a lycan; he liked to be touched. Petted.
“You’re trying to piss me off,” she said, before sinking a fang through his earlobe.
The sweet nip of pain swelled his dick to the point of aching. Provoked, he rocked his hips against hers, nudging against her cleft. “Why would I do that?”
“You k-know why.” Her slender arms wrapped around him. “I know why.”
Because a pissed-off Vashti he could deal with. It was the newly discovered, tormented one that shredded him. She was so strong and fearless. To see such a magnificent woman reduced to cowering fear offended him deeply, made him want to rip something—or someone—apart.
Her fingers walked down his spine, eliciting a soft growl of pleasure. “Thank you for irritating me.”
“Actions speak louder than words. Touch me, Vashti.”
“Where?”
“Everywhere.” The way he needed her to but wouldn’t explain, not after the rough night they’d had. He could want her and like her, but needing her was too much. Didn’t make any damn sense. But then he wasn’t at his best now. In some ways, perhaps, the violent upheaval in his life had left him as raw as she was.
She moaned when he plumped her tit in his hand, then hissed as his mouth surrounded her and his tongue flicked lightly over her hardening nipple.
He also liked to lick.
“Mmm…” She arched her spine, pushing her lushness into his working lips. “You’re a breast man.”
He was a Vash man, but kept that to himself. Instead he wallowed in her, breathing in the cherry-sweet scent of her that drove him out of his mind. She responded by pushing her fingers into his hair and kneading his scalp, holding him close. His eyes closed on a groan. A shudder racked his frame.
“Can you be so easy to pleasure, lycan?” she asked softly.
“Why don’t you try and see what happens?”
CHAPTER 8
“Father.”
Syre glanced over at his son standing in the doorway and took one last, deep drink from the wrist at his mouth. He licked the wound closed and lifted his head, looking into the dazed blue eyes of the sexy brunette who’d been feeding him. “Get some orange juice, Kelly, and go lie down for an hour or two.”
She blinked, coming to a fuller awareness. Her mouth curved as she focused on him, completely unaware that she’d just donated a pint of blood to his diet. “Come with me.”
“I’ll join you,” he promised, looking forward to it. Kelly was hot to get fucked, having come into Raceport for the express purpose of indulging in as much booze and sex as she could get her hands on. He’d carefully cultivated Raceport to become a premier destination for bikers and their babes, needing the adventurous transients to fuel the proliferation of cabals and covens in the area. The abundance of sexual partners was a side benefit he hadn’t considered in advance, but was certainly appreciative of now.
Sex was one of the few activities in his life that made him feel…human. For a little while.
Pouting, she pushed to her feet and tossed her long hair over her shoulder. Her midriff was bared by her cropped tank and her legs were exposed by super-short cutoff jeans. Her slender arms were covered in sleeves of tattoos, and her navel was pierced with a tiny silver ring. Syre enjoyed the view despite its inability to truly inspire him. He preferred a different sort of female, mature and discerning, but he’d long ago realized what a mistake he was in those women’s lives. He could give nothing but physical pleasure, which eventually turned into emotional pain. So he’d learned to ignore what suited him best in favor of partnering with women whom he best suited, even though that was very rarely one and the same.
“The sooner you leave, Kelly,” Torque said drily, “the sooner he’ll join you.”
She turned, realizing they weren’t alone in his suite after all. For a moment, she looked irritated; then her gaze swept over Torque, warming with interest.
The resemblance between him and Torque was so slight as to be almost nonexistent. Like his twin, Shadoe, Torque had taken after their mother in his facial features. He was shorter than Syre by half a foot, lean in the waist and hips but thick with muscle in the thighs, arms, and chest. His brutally short hair was spiked in opposing directions, the thick Asian locks dyed a shocking green at the tips. It was a style that suited both his sloe eyes and his sharp-edged lifestyle. Torque managed a chain of clubs that offered haven to fledgling minions while also catering to the hungers of elder vampires.
Licking her lips, Kelly offered, “Why don’t you join us, too?”
Torque’s face stayed hard, his heart too freshly shattered by the loss of his mate, Nikki, to even think about sex. “Sorry. Sharing pussy with Syre is a bit too incestuous for my tastes.”
“Incestuous?” She frowned and glanced at Syre, who appeared to be about ten years older than Torque’s mid-twenties appearance. “No way are you related.”
Syre caught her gaze and murmured, “Go.”
The compulsion settled into her mind and she nodded, exiting the room with a dreamy smile.
“They never believe me,” Torque said, coming deeper into the room and dropping into a black leather wingback.
“How are you?”
“You keep asking me that.”
“You keep being evasive.” He knew his son’s pain, had experienced it himself when he’d lost his mate so very, very long ago. And Torque was a naphil, one of the nephalim children he and the other Fallen had created with their mortal mates before their fall. The nephalim were halflings, part angel and part mortal. Unlike the Fallen or minions, they had souls. They felt joy and pain more deeply; Syre’s lingering grief was a shadow of what his beloved son felt.
“I’m terrible,” Torque said bluntly. “The Alpha told Vashti the truth: there was anticoagulant in the blood we found at the site of Nikki’s abduction, which makes it possible he was set up to take the blame. I’m back at square one looking for whoever took her from me.”
“We’ll find them,” Syre promised, vengeance hot and fierce in his veins. It was the overriding emotion in his life of late, as his carefully constructed world crumbled around him.
“Don’t count on it. The cabal in Anaheim has been slaughtered. Every single member.”
Syre hissed out his breath. “An angel somewhere is covering his or her tracks. Whose side are they are on? They steal Lindsay from Adrian and deliver her into my hands, then vanquish the vampires who saw to her delivery.”
“Who the fuck knows?” Torque’s booted foot rapped out a frustrated staccato on the hardwood floor. “Even if it is an angel, there’s no guarantee it was a Sentinel. It could be a winged class of demon who took her from Angels’ Point, for all we know.”
“Who else would have access to stored lycan blood but a Sentinel?” Adrian’s cryogenic storage facilities were well guarded by Sentinels. Not even the lycans themselves had access to their own samples.
“You’re assuming there’s only one individual responsible for both Nikki and Lindsay’s abductions.”
“Occam’s Razor,” Syre murmured, his mind shifting through the known facts.
“Fuck Occam. I’d like to shove his razor up his ass.”
Brows lifting, he refocused on his son. “Use your anger to strengthen your focus.”
“None of us have our head in the game, Dad. We??
?re all reeling.” Torque took a deep breath. “But the reason I interrupted your afternoon snack is Vash. I just got off the phone with Salem, and he’s concerned about the Alpha.”
“So am I.” He would never forget the sight of Vash pinned to a tree by a bristling, infuriated lycan—a breed she had just cause to revile.
“He fucked her last night.”
A long moment passed as Syre’s brain struggled to process the impossible. “Be careful how you speak of her.”
“How else am I supposed to say it?” Leaning forward, Torque set his elbows on his knees and clasped his hands. “I know how she feels about lycans, and this one is under suspicion for Nikki’s kidnapping.”
“But we seem to have discovered that he’s not responsible.”
“Let’s not forget the lycan she tortured for information. What are the chances the Alpha doesn’t know about that or that she was hunting him when she did it? You ever heard of a lycan not avenging the unprovoked death of a packmate?”
“You think he forced her? Or extorted her cooperation in some way? Is that what Salem said?” Syre’s voice was low and furious. The thought twisted through his mind, rousing a murderous ferocity.
He would raze the earth to protect Vashti. She was his conscience, his adviser, his hammer, his ambassador, and countless other extensions of himself. She was the strongest woman he’d ever known, yet he’d seen her shattered into pieces. Utterly broken and defiled. She’d pulled herself together in the years since, but the cracks and fissures remained. While others thought she was harder and more inviolate than she had ever been, he knew she was more fragile. It was why he forced himself—against every instinct—to keep her on the front lines. If she thought he viewed her as diminished by the desecrations inflicted on her, it would be a blow he didn’t think she was strong enough to bear. His belief in her strength was what bolstered her belief in herself.
“Salem doesn’t know what’s going on; that’s why he called. He only knows that they had sex and the Alpha wouldn’t let him see Vash this morning, said she was sleeping.”
Syre pushed to his feet, knowing damn well that Vash hadn’t slept in ages.
“She hasn’t touched a man since Charron,” Torque reminded him unnecessarily. “You really think her first go would be with a lycan?”
“Ready my plane.” Syre stalked toward his bedroom to pack. He’d heard enough. “I want to take off within the hour.”
Vash blinked against the harsh glare of the sun as she exited Shred. Behind her, Elijah growled at the Vegas heat not yet at its fiercest. Lycans were sensitive creatures, which—if she’d been thinking clearly—might’ve clued her in to how much Elijah enjoyed being touched. She knew now, and she damned the time constraints that prevented her from indulging him. She’d had him purring at the time Salem came back to pound on the door. Her captain had given them barely thirty minutes between interruptions, just long enough for Salem to get a blow job while he called Torque, taking multitasking to the extreme.
If she could have…if there had been time…she would have sent Salem away so Elijah could finish what he’d started. She was shamed now to think of what she’d done to him the night before in her fear. Her own astonishing weakness for him made her so vulnerable, which both terrified her and made her blind to his returning vulnerability where she was concerned. That she, a woman who’d long ago learned to use her attractiveness against men, could miss that susceptibility was a sign of how skewed she was. It would have soothed her body and mind to do it over again, to start the day with gentle morning sex to erase the lingering anger of the night before and to reestablish her control of herself and the situation.
Taking a deep breath, she tried to clear Elijah from her mind. She’d reached the Jeep alongside Salem before she realized the Alpha wasn’t with them. Turning around, she looked for him and found him circling slowly, his head tilted back to put his nose in the air. Something in the way he held his body warned her. She grabbed one of her katanas and her cell phone from the backseat and returned to him.
“What is it?” Vash inhaled again, but her sense of smell wasn’t as acute as a lycan’s.
As she shoved her phone into her top, he looked at her, his face grim. “An infected. No more than two blocks over. Somewhere to the north of us.”
Yanking his shirt over his head, he toed off his boots and dropped his jeans. In an instant he was wolven, a big and beautifully regal beast. A moment beyond that, he was gone.
She was right on his tail, tracking the scent of him that seemed embedded in her senses. Distantly, she was aware of Salem at her side. They’d been hunting together so long it was effortless. He feinted in counterpoint to her, darting around obstacles like Dumpsters and discarded cardboard boxes. With nary a signal between them, they took to the walls, racing opposite each other down an alleyway. Her hair whipped in the wind, her steel stilettos bit into the stucco, breaking off chunks to crumble to the ground below.
And in the back of her mind she was aware that Elijah had thrown himself into a hunt for a vampire without a second thought. One of her people, as they were all hers. As if it was instinctive for him to do so when in truth he’d simply been well trained. By Adrian.
How could that have slipped in importance in her mind?
The shattering of glass preceded her turning a corner. Elijah’s tail disappearing through a broken window directed her along with his scent. It was a building under construction; most of the windows still bore the manufacturer’s sticker. Salem bounded through first, widening the opening. Vash sailed through after him, tucking and rolling and springing up onto her feet. And froze.
The construction workers that should have been all over the site were all over the floor instead. In pieces.
Salem cursed. Elijah crouched low and growled.
The bare concrete was covered in blood and entrails. Limbs and heads were scattered across the floor or lifted to ravenous foaming maws of at least a dozen wraiths. Bloodshot eyes glittered, nostrils twitching as they smelled fresh meat.
Vash had seen such carnage before, when a rogue minion, driven insane by the deterioration of his mortal soul, had Changed everyone in his family. Lost to the initial bloodlust of the Change, they’d gone on a rampage, slaughtering their entire neighborhood.
God. It never got easier to bear.
One of the wraiths stood apart from the others. Hunched and shuffling, he darted back and forth swiftly, wearing a semicircular path in the blood. His gaze was riveted to Elijah, who paced with restless energy. With his ears flattened to his head, the Alpha snarled a threat.
The sickened vamp glanced at Vash and Salem. “Go. Away.”
The words were uttered in a voice so guttural it took her a moment to figure out what he’d said. “Fuckin’ A. Did that wraith just talk?”
Just as she processed the possibility of higher brain function, the wraith leaped a good twenty feet across the room…directly at her. Startled, she raised her katana, knowing she was a split second too late and steeling herself for the impact.
Elijah blocked the assault in midair, jaws first, catching the wraith in the juncture between the shoulder and neck. A sickening crunch reverberated through the space, inciting an unexpected reaction—the bloodpack abandoned their feast and lunged at the powerful lycan en masse.
Vashti leaped into the fray with a scream of rage, cutting anything that got in her way. Salem waded in bare-handed, cracking heads and necks as he progressed. None of the wraiths came after them. They remained dog piled on Elijah, ignoring the incoming vamps with a complete lack of self-preservation. Tossing his head, Elijah threw one after another over the writhing bodies surrounding him, his growls and barks lost amid the mindless screeches of his attackers.
She sliced through the frenzy toward the center, her heart pounding when she lost sight of him completely. Spurting blood obscured her vision as she hacked her way deeper. She swiped at her eyes, searching for Elijah amid the massacre, yelling his name.
His y
elp of pain seized her lungs. His pained howl broke her paralysis. “Salem! Goddamn it. Help him.”
“I can’t get to him. Shit. I’m fucking trying!”
Yanking heads back by fistfuls of gray hair, she ripped wraiths off her lycan and decapitated them, her stomach knotting at the sight of chunks of bloodied fur clinging to their foaming mouths.
An agonized scream rent the air, followed by another.
Not Elijah. The tone wasn’t deep enough. Jesus. The room was spinning around her in her panic.
She hauled another wraith back and saw Elijah in the space she’d opened up. The wraith’s body went limp in her grasp, then began to convulse. Another wraith jerked away. Then another.
Suddenly what was left of the bloodpack fell away from the downed lycan. Flopping on their backs like fish out of water, they writhed, foam pouring from their mouths and their eyes rolling back. The one who’d spoken clutched his head, wailing. Abruptly, he ceased, crashing to the ground in a dead faint.
Or just dead, period.
When nothing moved in the lake of blood, Vash dropped her blade and sank to her knees beside Elijah, who lay panting on his side, his fur matted and his flesh torn away in deep gouges. She reached out, wanting to comfort but unsure of how she could.
“Don’t touch him!” Salem kicked bodies out of the way as he approached.
Elijah gave a low warning growl.
“He’s a wounded animal, Vash. You know better.”
Yes, she knew. Lycans were at their fiercest when they were most vulnerable. But as she looked into the green eyes of the wolf, she saw the man. The man who’d mastered her during the long night, then surrendered to her touch in the morning.
“Can you shift?” she asked softly, knowing that the process of shifting forms would knit some of his injuries and staunch the copious amounts of blood draining from his body.
His eyes closed on a shuddering breath. He was still for so long she feared she’d lost him.
“Elijah!” The urgency in her voice made it harsh. Uncaring of the danger, she gingerly touched his head, stroking it. His eyelids lifted slowly, revealing unfocused irises. “Shift. Now. You can do it, you arrogant son of a bitch. You’re too fucking stubborn to let a couple of diseased vamps get the best of you.”