And she was a locator, rare in either the vampire or the human world. But how had either Kiernan or Daniel found her? He’d heard of this kind of ability, and that it could only work if paired with a vampire of sufficient power. Through the blood-chain, she’d be able to access his power, draw it into her, and eventually gain the skill of connecting with anything she wanted to find.
In this case, a weapon to destroy his kind.
That anger toward the vampire world radiated from her didn’t surprise him. The worlds had begun to clash, and it was getting harder and harder to keep the vampire world a secret.
And somehow she had run head-on into either Kiernan or Daniel, a deal had been struck probably involving a small fortune, and now she was here.
Yet really angry, as though some injustice had been done to her. That was the surprise: that she would be using Kiernan to gain a fortune, yet be almost as angry as he was by the arrangement.
Now, there was a mystery to solve.
Because she was so physically close, however, a more urgent problem surfaced as he caught the rich scent of her blood. His hunger returned and he groaned.
He felt her emotions abruptly shift to concern for him. “How badly are you hurt?”
“Not hurt. I need blood.” He glared at her. But the woman ought to know what was headed her way, and that he’d hit her like a freight train right now if she didn’t back off.
She leaned away from him as though sensing his thoughts. Her eyes widened, and now he smelled how much he frightened her.
The scent of fear beat at him and his fangs emerged. “You’d better move as far from me as you can right now—or offer me a vein. One or the other, human.”
She rose to her feet then backed up far enough that he felt the tug of the chain at his neck, the warning that because they were bound, they were limited by distance as well.
He pressed his hand against the chain and glanced at the woman. She stood ten feet away, no more.
He closed his eyes.
Bound, again.
Chain-bound.
He’d worn a different set of chains in his youth. He’d been bound to the evil one, and couldn’t leave the house or the grounds since dear old Dad had built an electric fence to keep his sons prisoner.
“Adrien.”
He shifted his head toward her once more.
“I … this isn’t who I am.”
“What do you mean?”
She shifted her gaze away from him. “Nothing. Never mind. As soon as you’re able, there’s a shower in my tent. It’ll help.”
But a different kind of emotion vibrated through the chain at his neck, coming from her. He didn’t understand it at first; then a roll of pain went through him and he finally got it: The human was incredibly sad. In fact, she was grief-stricken.
But the part of him that had suffered snorted at her despair. Let the human feel her pain.
What was she to him?
What could she ever be to him, but the enemy?
* * *
Lily slid both arms over her stomach as she stared at the massive vampire in the huge yet too-small metal tub. He watched her with such a predatory stare that chills kept chasing over her body.
She sensed so many things from him—his confusion, his anger, but mostly his blood-hunger—and right now she felt like the fly to his spider.
She’d never been around a man like him before. The sheer size of him was enough to make her wary. Only he wasn’t just a man, but a vampire, a different race altogether, something she didn’t understand, something she didn’t trust, something much more animal than human.
And lethal.
Nor was it helping that the shared chain opened him up to her, revealing his aggressive intentions toward her—his desire for her blood for one thing, and sex for another. His level of determination became an itch on her skin.
Right then she felt the energy of who he was: a ball of fire, of rage. He had power as well. Formidable power. Kiernan had told her that Adrien had the potential to become an Ancestral, something rare in the vampire world and something laden with preternatural ability.
And for the first time, she truly doubted that she’d ever be able to see her mission through. For one thing, his loyalties lay elsewhere, with his brothers still in prison and with the vampire world generally, so he could never be a truly reliable partner. But given his size and physical strength, that he was a trained fighter and that he had tremendous potential among his kind, what on earth made Kiernan think she’d be able to control him all the way to the end?
* * *
Adrien stood beneath the shower attached to Lily’s tent. He hadn’t been clean in a year and he didn’t care how many times Lily’s crew had to refill the tank, he’d be damned before he took one more step into the future without getting every molecule of filth off him.
He scrubbed his hair until his scalp burned; his legs, arms, and chest until his skin felt raw; his crotch until he felt bruised.
Only then, stripped of the last of the cavern muck, did he step, naked as hell, from the shower into Lily’s tent. His captor sat at a small desk.
She glanced at him and grew very still as she looked him up and down. Her lips parted, her nostrils flared. And just like that, as unexpected as anything he could have imagined, he smelled her sex, a warm, sweet flow of desire that tightened his abs. She wants me.
She cleared her throat, then gestured to a stack of towels on a small table to his right. “Help yourself.”
She returned to review something on her desk, a small notepad. She rubbed her neck beneath her binding chain. Apparently, the fairly lightweight string of small black loops chafed her as it did him.
Good. If he had to be bound, then he wanted her annoyed and scratching to get free as well.
His jaw quivered at the sight of her, all woman, a reminder yet again that he’d not been between a woman’s legs in too damn long.
He let his gaze fall slowly down her body. She stretched, her hands behind her back, which pushed her chest forward. Her breasts were large and firm. A nice handful. A better mouthful. Her narrow waist flared to womanly hips.
Her hair hung in soft waves to the middle of her back in a light brown, layered flow with subtle gold streaks, hair obviously cared for in an expensive salon. Once again he noticed the beauty of her hazel eyes. She had thick dark lashes, arched brows, full lips.
She turned toward him and he let the towel fall away from his now partially erect cock. She needed to know what he intended her to have, the sooner the better.
“What am I supposed to do about clothes?” he asked.
Her gaze dropped exactly where he wanted it. But she looked away, swirling her hand in his direction. “At least put a towel over that.”
“You might as well get used to it, Lily.” She jumped at the use of her name. “I haven’t gotten laid in a long time and it’s all I can think about right now. That, and tapping your vein.”
She shook her head, color climbing her cheeks. “You’ve got the free use of your hand.”
Oh, this was too easy. He stared at her hard as he took his cock in his fist and started stroking. “You’re right, I do.”
She made a disgusted sound, left her chair, and headed to the front tent flaps.
He called out, “Wait, human—”
But she’d moved too fast trying to get away from him. She got pulled backward by the chain’s power and landed on her ass. He couldn’t help himself: He laughed long and loud, and it felt good.
She stood up and swiped at her jeans. She turned to face him, her jaw grinding. “Would you please cover up?”
The slight note of desperation in her voice made him wonder. He leveled his gaze on her and asked, “You sure you want me to do that?”
She looked him up and down once more, blinking a couple of times.
She took a deep breath. “This isn’t going to be simple,” she muttered. Meeting his gaze once more, she said, “Yes, please cover up. I won’t deny I’m tem
pted, because ever since I saw you in the cave, the chains haven’t really stopped vibrating, and I’ve been experiencing visions as well. I’m feeling too much here, but I’m not fool enough to believe it means anything. You know how you look, how women react to you. You’re a slab of meat, nothing more.”
Hatred boiled in him that she would speak to him that way. In his world, he was admired and not just because of his appearance. For her to reduce him to something found in a slaughterhouse repulsed him. She had no soul, this woman, bent on using him for her own purposes, probably to make a fortune just as all corrupt humans did in their world.
He’d met so many like her. They’d catch rumors of the secret vampire world and hear tales of making a fortune by selling their fellow humans—mostly women, but some men as well—to vermin like Kiernan. Those humans in Kiernan’s mold would serve as go-betweens, approaching Daniel or a dozen other vampires who ran illegal sex-slave clubs that traded in human flesh. But it was always the humans who brought their captives to market, selling them like cattle.
Of course both Daniel and Kiernan did a lot more than just trade in human flesh, especially now that Daniel ruled the Council of Ancestrals and could do as he pleased. Daniel would forge documents and take control of mineral-rich caverns owned by wealthy vampires. Then he’d sell the caves off to Kiernan, who in turn worked surreptitiously with many human government officials, each profiting as the food chain went on and on, everyone involved obligated, by the heinous nature of the transactions, to continue keeping the vampire world a secret.
One day this house of cards would fall down, but probably not for a few years yet, maybe even decades.
All of it disgusted Adrien, and now he was bound to a human woman who had also sold her soul for profit, something apparently she was willing to die for.
Lily now hunted for the extinction weapon, at Daniel’s request, forging a tracking bond with Adrien. Through the shared chain, as she siphoned his power, she’d be able to locate the weapon, at least in theory.
Though rumors had abounded since the 1950s about the existence of the weapon, other rumors had surfaced as well: that there had been several versions of the weapon, and that the remnants of those weapons had been hidden away in hundreds of caverns all over the globe.
Hunting for a viable weapon would be the old needle-in-a-haystack pursuit.
He took a towel and slowly wrapped it around his waist.
Lily returned to her chair but shifted it to face in his direction. She dipped her chin toward another, larger chair. “Why don’t you sit down and we can talk for a few minutes? Things need to be said, plans laid out.” He felt the weight of her words, and at the same time the chains that bound them together spoke to him of all that sadness again.
He tucked the white terry in at the waist.
He sat down carefully in the large camp chair, hoping it would hold. He was a lot of vampire to test so little canvas.
“It’s good for up to three hundred pounds,” she said.
He nodded, then settled in, stretching out his legs. Damn but it felt good to move, to be free of his shackles, even to sit. He rubbed his wrists.
“The first thing you need to know is that you’ve been released permanently from prison. No going back. I was told it’s all legal and that your release will be publicized to your world over the next few days, which means that you won’t have to worry about anyone coming after you.”
“I’m not worried about that.”
“Why? I thought that would be your first concern, that you’d land back in prison before we even got started.”
“Daniel put us there, and I don’t intend to let it happen again.”
She met his gaze, her expression grim. “I can feel through the chain that you mean what you say.”
He nodded.
She picked up the list she’d made and flipped the edges of the paper. She drew in a deep breath then stood up. “I want you to know that while you’re in my care, Adrien, I intend to be humane.”
He snorted his laughter. “How kind of you. Then I should be clear as well: I’ll need blood, soon. And sex. If you can’t provide either, you’ll need to bring someone in. Got it?”
“Understood.”
“Has it occurred to you, human, that I might not want to help you find this weapon?”
At that, she leveled her hazel eyes on him. “I’ve thought about that, but I already know something about you because of the chains: You’ll do whatever you need to do to survive, to get back to your brothers here in the cavern in order to free them. Am I right?”
He nodded. “Just short of turning a race-killing weapon over to Daniel or anyone else like him. So you work for Harris Kiernan.”
“I wouldn’t say that I work for him.”
“But you think he’s a stand-up guy, no doubt.”
She leveled her gaze at Adrien. “I wouldn’t say that, either. I’ve never met him. We’ve handled everything through email and the much rarer phone call. That’s it.”
“Well, take it from me, he’s a real prick.”
She stared at nothing in particular. “Yes, I would say he is.”
He felt it again, a vast amount of sadness—and somehow Kiernan was connected to it. He wondered if she’d been a sex slave at one time, but she didn’t seem the type, she didn’t seem ruined in that way. No, whatever had caused her so much grief was something else.
She lowered her chin slightly and drew in a deep breath. “Now I have a question for you. Kiernan explained to me about how vampires can use a phenomenon that he called altered flight—sort of like moving at a fantastic speed but in some kind of altered reality that allows you to pass through anything solid. Is that right?”
He nodded.
“And just how good are you at altered flight?”
He lifted a single brow. “How good am I?”
“Kiernan suggested that because I’m human, we might have some trouble getting from one place to the next.”
He eyed her narrowly again. The woman had guts, he’d give her that. Humans didn’t enter altered flight easily, not with lesser vampires like himself. Any vampire of Ancestral status could easily take a human anywhere around the globe within minutes, sometimes seconds—they were that fast, that powerful.
But Adrien had resisted his Ancestral call for centuries, being outraged generally by that inbred, narcissistic, compassionless, and incredibly ineffective group for as long as he could remember. He’d rather eat dog shit than become an Ancestral.
No, this would be a rough ride for Lily. She knew it, too, by the look in her eye, like someone facing a tiger in the dark.
His mind shifted sideways for a moment. She stood at least five-ten, not a bad height against his own six-six. Her hazel eyes glinted in fear, but her lovely chin rose with courage. He had a sudden desire to put his hand on her face and rub his thumb along her cheekbone.
With these thoughts, his chain vibrated softly against his neck and chest. Dammit, he liked the look of her, and as much as he wanted to despise her, the blood-chain told him a different story.
He looked away from her, steeling his mind against any kind of thought that would make him sympathetic toward her.
“So what I suggest is that we head to Paris, using altered flight. I understand you have an apartment there. Or will that be too much for you?”
He snorted. “Hell, no, it’s not too much for me, but you’re probably not going to like it.”
“Doesn’t matter. Let’s get going. You can get dressed and I’ll alert Kiernan that I have you in my custody, then we’ll see what he wants us to do next.”
Adrien stilled. He hated the thought of leaving the Himalayas and his brothers—but what choice did he have?
No, this path was set. He could feel in his bones that he needed to travel this course. He would just have to trust that somehow, as he went along, he’d figure this out: how to survive, how to keep Lily alive, and above all, should they actually find the extinction weapon, how to keep Dan
iel or Kiernan from gaining control of it. And somewhere in there he’d get back to Lucian and Marius.
He dropped the towel and held his hand out to her. “Okay, Lily, let’s get the hell out of here.”
* * *
Lily glanced at his open palm, and her heart rate jumped up a few notches. She’d already touched him, but this felt different—as though a door swung wide, daring her to step through. That strange sensation reached her again, the one she’d felt in the cavern when she first saw Adrien, of a kind of strange knowing, like an echo bouncing from one jagged stone wall to the next.
But how could she really know a man she’d just met?
Her chain vibrated once more and as had happened from the first, her desire for him spiked, something she had a hard time squashing down. Of course, it didn’t help that he stood in front of her with his extraordinary body on full display. She’d never seen a man like him before.
“Take my hand, Lily. We need to go.”
Another deep breath and she placed her hand in his but retained her distance.
He shook his head. “No, this won’t work. You’ll have to come closer. Altered flight can be damn dangerous for humans. I’ll need to protect you the whole way.”
Her heart now thumped heavily in her chest. She didn’t want to get closer to this vampire, but she didn’t really have a choice. “Fine.”
As she moved toward him, he drew her into his arms so that she ended up balanced on top of his feet, her arms wrapped around his neck. Basically, she was plastered against his naked body.
He slid his arms around her back and waist and held her tight—but nothing happened, at least not the altered flight phenomenon Kiernan had told her about. Instead, she felt him take a deep breath and release it slowly.
Lily hadn’t been this close to a man in a long time, not since her husband died two years ago. She’d forgotten how it felt, the simple pleasure of the hard planes of a man’s chest, his heavier muscled thighs, and of course she couldn’t ignore his cock, which she felt firming up against her lower abdomen.
She wished there was some other way of doing this because it felt so good, even dangerous. The chains had already begun exposing the depth of her need and of her desire for the vampire, but this level of proximity wasn’t helping at all.