Bane's Choice

by Alyssa Day

  Chapter Twelve

  Carter Reynolds, president of the Wolf Pack MC, stalked into the room, stared down at the battered and bound white-haired vampire lying in the middle of his clubhouse floor, and felt a killing rage rising inside him.

  “Somebody better tell me, right now, who the fuck thought that breaking our treaty with the vampires was a good thing to do,” he roared.

  The twenty or so of his pack who’d followed him into the clubhouse dropped to their knees when his power washed over them, but nobody even tried to answer.

  He’d known, when they rode up and discovered the sentries unconscious on the ground outside and the clubhouse door swinging open, that it would be bad. He’d expected bad.

  He hadn’t expected now we’re fucked all to hell.

  His head started throbbing in reaction to the fury pounding through his skull. There would be blood paid for this. “Damn it.”

  The vampire twitched, its face still hidden beneath a tangle of that pure white hair, causing the men nearest him to flinch and back away. The wolves all knew what vampires were capable of doing to anybody stupid enough to think a bloodsucker was down for the count.

  They’d lost club members to just such stupid complacency in the past. But this—this wasn’t on them.

  And Carter didn’t even know who this was.

  “We didn’t do this to you,” he told the vampire. “If you’ll hold still, we’ll remove these chains, and—”

  “I’d advise against it,” said an icy female voice that sent revulsion skittering down his spine. “Consider him to be a gift.”

  The vampire’s eyes, which had been fluttering open, closed again, and Carter turned to face the warlock striding toward him. She was definitely a warlock, although she’d been able to mask the stench of her magic until she was almost on them, and that was a new trick that signaled bad fucking times in the future.

  “It’s not my birthday,” Carter said dryly.

  His second, Max, started to rise, but he shook his head at her. Nobody needed to get in the scary warlock’s path until he could figure out what the hell she wanted.

  The warlock presented as young and beautiful like they almost all—male or female—did, whether they’d lived for decades or centuries, but Carter knew better than to trust appearances. His nose, even in human form, told a story of rot and death, not beauty.

  “My name is Sylvie,” the warlock proclaimed, in the tone of one giving him a great boon. She stared at him as if she expected him to bow or kiss her damn hand.

  She was in the wrong place if she expected bowing and scraping. He’d been the alpha of this pack since he was nineteen years old, and he sure as hell hadn’t gotten the job by backing down before predators.

  He studied the face she wore. White skin, black hair. Black eyes, to match the blackened soul all warlocks carried, if they still had souls at all. Tall. Slender. Long legs. Just the kind of woman he’d give a second glance, except this wasn’t a woman at all.

  Warlocks were pure evil wrapped in a skin sack. And it was bad fucking news that this one had apparently decided to take an interest in his pack.

  Or in him.

  “We’re taking over this territory,” she said. “We could have use for you and your wolves, if you do what you’re told.”

  Some of his pack began to growl, and she glanced dismissively at them and then laughed. “Oh! Please! Please challenge me. I love to play with puppies!”

  With that, she flicked her fingers at Max, who fell over, her body contorting, her face grimacing horribly as a screeching howl burst out of her. Max smacked into the ground two seconds later and then—before Carter could even move—Max’s wolf form burst free of her human body and crouched, shuddering in reaction, on the floor.

  He could feel waves of shock equaling his own resonating from his pack. None of them, not even the strongest, could change that fast. The warlock had pulled Max’s wolf out of her like she was selecting a chocolate from a box—casually and almost without thought.

  Max shivered and turned dark eyes to him, and he could feel her pain radiating through his mind.

  “We’ll be in touch, Wolf,” Sylvie said, turning those black eyes to him. “Discard the vampire however you want. He’ll be in hell with the rest of his kind before very long, you can be sure of that. The Chamber is taking over this territory. And you’ll either work for us or die.”

  With that, she strode back out of the room, pulling a veil of black smoke around her as she reached the door.

  And then she was gone.

  He pointed at two of his wolves, who both ran to follow her but returned almost immediately.

  “She’s gone. No car, no bike, no sign of her walking,” Yerby said, shaking his head, shivers of reaction—or revulsion—wracking his muscled form. “The men who stayed outside to help the sentries are out cold, too. We need help to get them inside. Figure out if we need an ambulance.”

  Carter swore, fists clenching, but then nodded, and several of the pack ran to assist. He was grimly pleased to see no sign of reluctance from his people, in spite of the natural and pretty damn intelligent instinct to avoid anything to do with blood magic. When he looked down, the vampire was staring up at him with glowing silver eyes set in a surprisingly youthful face, considering the hair.

  “I think we need to talk,” the vampire said, snapping his bonds as if they were nothing and then leaping to his feet.

  Carter held up a hand when he noticed some of his pack crouch into attack mode. The relationship between werewolf and vampire had never been an easy one, in spite of their current fragile truce, but the danger of warlocks blew through old rivalries like an icy breeze through a puff of smoke.

  Then he nodded at the vampire. “I think you’re right.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Bane waited until he heard Meara run downstairs before making his move, and every second lasted a hundred years.

  He was surely losing his mind.

  “Watch him,” he ordered Luke. “Call Edge and get his ass back here to help. He can carry his weight in things that don’t involve computers, too.”

  Luke’s eyes gleamed with amusement and something that looked too damn much like pity. “Sure, boss. But if you go after her now, you may just be chasing after her for a long time to come. It’s not very dignified of you.”

  “Fuck dignity,” Bane snarled, and then he all but flew out of the room and down the hall, catching Ryan before she’d closed the door to Meara’s bathroom behind her.

  “No. Not here.”

  She jumped and then shot him a narrow-eyed glance over one bare shoulder, which naturally made him think hot, delicious thoughts of licking her creamy skin in that very place. Biting her…

  No. Not biting.

  “Not here, what? And will you please quit giving me orders, already? Your enthrally voice doesn’t work on me, and overbearing men trying to tell me what to do is not a new tune in my particular symphony. I don’t respond well to it. Not at work, and not in my personal life, and not…not in whatever this is.”

  “Your symphony?” She made his head hurt. She didn’t make sense, and yet the intelligence in her eyes was sharper than the silver blade in its sheath at his hip. She was afraid of him, and yet she was fearless.

  She was plain, and yet she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever encountered.

  As if drawn to the parallel, his own reaction to her was equally nonsensical. He wanted her to go away, before she pulled him further into her sensual, magnetic orbit.

  He wanted her never, ever to leave him.

  He wanted to fuck her while draining her dry.

  “This must be what it feels like to go mad,” he said, shaking his head once, hard, to dislodge any incipient insanity.

  A flash of darkness slid behind her eyes, and her shoulders slumped just a fraction be
fore she tightened her arms around the towels she held and turned to face him.

  “You seem pretty sane to me.” Her eyes darkened to a stormy blue, their intensity deepening. “No, Bane-who-is-not-a-hallucination-but-something-so-much-worse. I think you’re not going mad. If anyone in this room is going mad, it is either me—for believing I’m in a house filled with vampires—or maybe Meara.”

  That caught him off guard. His sister was one of the sanest people he’d ever met. “Meara?”

  Ryan waved her hand, the gesture encompassing the bathroom. “I have never seen anything messier in my life that wasn’t the before on some TV show about hoarders.”

  He laughed and then froze in astonishment when he heard the rusty sound. He’d laughed more in the scant few hours since meeting this human than he had in years.

  Maybe even decades.

  Why?

  And why did it matter? Why was he bothering to analyze a momentary pleasure?

  Perhaps because he’d had so few of those in recent years.

  Decades.

  “Meara is rather careless of her things, but in her defense, she cleans her own rooms. She says she’d never inflict her messes on Mrs. Cassidy.”

  “Mrs. Cassidy?”

  “Our housekeeper.”

  Ryan’s lovely, full mouth fell open just a little. “You have a housekeeper? Is she a vampire, too?”

  “No, she—”

  “Does she know about you? Is she enthralled? Is she, like, your Renfield? Do you—”

  “Enough,” he protested, wanting very much to pound his head against the wall. “There are no Renfields. Bram Stoker has much to answer for, and I plan to tell him that the next time I see him,” he said grimly.

  “Well, I…what? The next time you see him? Bram Stoker is alive after all these… Oh. My. God. Bram Stoker is a vampire?” Her voice rose so high it was nearly squeaking by the end of her question.

  “How do you think he got so much right?”

  She rolled her eyes. “How would I know what he got right, since I thought Dracula was fiction until about an hour ago?”

  Bane’s breath caught in his throat. “You rolled your eyes at me.”

  “And I probably will again, when you say something stupid.” She blinked then and bit her lip. “Yeah, okay, probably not brilliant to call a vampire stupid. You’re not going to kill me, are you?”

  His gut tightened at the hard truth that he probably would have to kill her. She was immune to compulsion, and there was no other way to be sure she’d never give away their secrets. But…later.

  He could always kill her later.

  “We can discuss that at another time, Doctor,” he muttered. “I’ll answer all your questions. After you have a shower and dress. I believe you’d feel much more at ease if you were not so…lacking in clothing.”

  And why did he care if she felt at ease? His entire existence had been about making people feel uneasy. Also, he quite enjoyed her lack of clothing.

  This woman was turning his life upside down, and he didn’t like it.

  Lie.

  He liked it a lot.

  She glanced down at herself and blushed, and then a little of her bravado seemed to drain out with the color ebbing from her cheeks. Bane suddenly, viciously, wanted to punch himself in the face for stealing her courage. He might have to kill her, but he didn’t have to humiliate her.

  “Just come have a shower, in my very clean and uncluttered bathroom, and then I’ll answer any questions you have.”

  And then Bane, the most feared vampire on the entire East Coast, held his breath and found himself hoping, very hard, that the fascinating, infuriating human would follow him down the hall.

  …

  Ryan was a firm believer in shoulds and should nots, and so she quite definitely knew she should not be following a vampire down the hall to his bathroom. In fact, nothing about that sentence—or the actual doing of it—existed even in the same universe as Reliable Ryan, the woman who was never the brightest star in the room but could always be counted on to be perfectly dependable and dependably dull.

  She’d never had an actual adventure in her life, although her job gave her moments of excitement and fierce satisfaction—saving a life never, ever got old. But a bona fide adventure? No, she’d always left that to other people.

  Daring people.

  The kind of people who’d be bold enough to, for example, follow a vampire down the hall to his bathroom.

  “Is ‘bathroom’ code for ‘the room where you drain the blood from your victims and then climb into your coffin to sleep’?”

  He muttered something that sounded like “out of my mind” but kept walking. “No. Bathroom is code for ‘the place where you can take a shower, so my sister quits giving me death glares for being rude to a guest.’”

  “I’m a guest? Not an abductee?”

  He actually growled in response but said nothing, so she decided to shut up, look around, and see what happened next in this part of the waking dream she seemed to be having. Now—with his back to her—would be a great time to start running.

  To try to escape.

  But he’d almost certainly catch her. She’d seen how fast he could move. And it would probably make him angry, and maybe vampires got vicious when they were angry.

  He still hadn’t promised not to kill her, she realized, and the thought sent a cold shiver snaking down her spine.

  But, on the other hand, there was Hunter.

  For now—and maybe they’d be her own version of famous last words—she’d see what she could see. She’d always have a chance to escape when daylight came and they all went off to sleep in their coffins.

  If, in fact, any of that happened to be true in any way. Maybe they loved the sun and slept in beds with quilted bedspreads right in front of open windows.

  Or, maybe, her hungover brain was starting to stutter into idiocy. She took a deep breath, tried to shake off panic and mental fuzziness, and looked around.

  The hallway was as beautiful as the ballroom they’d come from. Rich, slightly faded Persian rugs that looked as authentic as the ones in her grandmother’s—now Ryan’s—home covered the lustrous hardwood floors all the way down the hall. Dark wooden panels covered the walls partway up, and then the most luscious wallpaper she’d ever seen, in a delicate pattern portraying a garden party in spring in perhaps the nineteenth century, continued to the high ceiling. A series of small tables, placed equidistant all down the hall, were resting places for large crystal vases filled with fresh flowers. Wall sconces held exquisite globes of what appeared to be hand-blown glass, lit from within with a warm golden glow. Considering her hosts were vampires, she was somewhat surprised not to see lanterns and candles instead of electric lights.

  And I’m trying very, very hard to focus on the walls and light fixtures, so I can avoid thinking about the hot vampire leading me down the hallway (pick one: a. to my doom or b. to a bathroom), and especially so I can avoid staring at the amazing musculature of his incredibly fine ass.

  Seriously, he could be a model for anatomical drawings, he’s so perfect. How unfair is that?

  “Very unfair,” she said firmly, as if to convince herself. Sadly, she wasn’t much of one to lie to herself, so she quit pretending she wasn’t staring at his butt or at the muscles in his broad shoulders or the narrowness of the waist that led to his hips and…

  …And there we are, back at his truly fine ass.

  “Do vampires have to work out?”

  This time, he stopped and turned to stare at her. “What?”

  “It seems fairly impossible that you can have that unbelievably perfect of an ass…anatomy, unless you work out, or it’s some vampire hocus pocus. I mean, your body is objectively perfect, isn’t it? Is that some magical side effect? I’m asking for scientific and evidentiary purposes, you
understand.”

  A slow smile of quite unfairly wicked sensuality spread across his quite unfairly beautiful face, and she wondered if it were possible for panties to self-destruct.

  “Perfect? I like the sound of that, Doctor. Shall we discuss the perfection of your ass…anatomy while we’re having this fascinating conversation?”

  And just like that, ice water washed over the unbelievable recklessness that had been running through her hormonally overactive mind.

  “Very funny. Nobody has ever called my overly round ass perfect, and I know it, so maybe we could quit with mocking the human who already has enough to deal with right now.”

  His eyes widened, and if he’d been human, she’d have said he was surprised. But he wasn’t human, and she didn’t know how to translate vampire facial expressions yet.

  Maybe widened eyes meant “I’m going to suck your blood from your body until you’re a dying, withered husk on the floor if you don’t shut up.”

  She shivered and caught him noticing, so she raised her chin and stiffened her shoulders, refusing to show fear.

  “I’m not mocking you, Ryan,” he said quietly. “Shockingly enough, I find little about this conversation, or this situation, funny.”

  With that, he turned and opened a door, pushing it open and gesturing to her to precede him into it.

  She leaned forward to try to peek around his very large body to see inside the room—hoping to see a bathroom, not a bare floor with chains on the walls, racks of torture instruments, and a drain—and was relieved to find instead a large, well-furnished room that looked more like a library than anything else.

  “That’s your bathroom?”

  When she dared a look up at him, he was smiling. Just a slight quirk of the corners of his lips, but she knew the hint of a smile when she saw one.

  “No, that’s my study. My bedroom is behind it, and it has an attached bathroom.”

  She clutched the towels more tightly to her chest. “Your, um, bedroom?”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Yes. I promise not to ravish you on the way to the bathroom, however,” he drawled, and she could feel the heat of embarrassment shoot through her veins and sparkle along her nerve endings.