by Larissa Ione
“This is disappointing,” Wraith drawled. “I expected more of a fight. I seriously wanted to tenderize you before I ate you. When are you guys going to learn that a gun is no substitute for learning hand-to-hand combat techniques?”
“Fuck you,” the guy spat.
“Guy like me?” Wraith smiled, leaned in so his lips grazed the guy’s cheek. “You. Wish.”
An outraged bellow made him smile even more. He inhaled the man’s aroma, anger tainted by a tantalizing thread of fear. Hunger roared through Wraith, and his fangs began to elongate. Playtime was over. He sank his teeth into the gangster’s throat. Warm, silky blood filled his mouth, and after a couple of spasms, his prey went limp.
Wraith could have used his Seminus gift to fill the guy’s head with happy, pleasant visions, but this dude was scum. The things he’d done slapped at Wraith’s brain in rapid-fire succession. Sure, Wraith was no angel—though he’d screwed a false one or two—but with the exception of Aegis Guardians, he didn’t harm human women or children.
This guy … well, Wraith wished he hadn’t blown this month’s kill quota on the Sumatran poacher. Still, tormenting the gangster could be fun. Swallowing the human’s alcohol-laced blood with relish, Wraith used his mind power to feed the guy gruesome images of what Wraith would do to him if he ever found out that he’d committed a violent crime again. Sure, for the most part he could care less if a human lived or died, but he had a soft spot for human females, and this slime got off on beating them.
Power surged through Wraith, power and adrenaline and flashes of heat lightning under his skin. His dermoire, a history of his Seminus demon paternity, pulsed from the tips of the fingers on his right hand to his shoulder and neck, and all the way to the right side of his face, where the swirling black glyphs marked him as a posts’genesis Seminus. Humans thought it was a tattoo—some thought it was cool, the rest were appalled.
Humans were so freaking uptight.
His prey’s pulse picked up as his heart tried to compensate for the blood loss. Wraith took two more strong pulls, disengaged his fangs, and hesitated before licking the puncture holes to seal the wound. He’d never minded drinking from his victims, but he hated licking them, tasting sweat, dirt, perfume, and worse, their individual essence. Cursing silently, he swiped the holes with his tongue and tried not to shudder, but the shakes wracked his body anyway.
“You should kill him.”
The male voice, deep and calm, startled him. No one sneaked up on Wraith. Ever.
He released the gangbanger, letting the guy hit the pavement with a thud. In a fluid, easy movement, he faced the newcomer, but too late he saw a flash and a blur, felt the sting of a dart in his throat.
“Shit!” Wraith ripped the dart from his neck and threw it to the ground, even as he charged the guy who had shot him with it. He was going to gut the bastard.
Wraith grabbed for the male’s shirt, some sort of burlap tunic, but his fingers only brushed the collar. The guy was unnaturally fast—unnaturally fast for a human. This male was demonkind, species unknown.
The male didn’t make a sound as he whispered through the night, moving in a blur toward a sewer grate. Awkwardly, because his left side had begun to weaken, Wraith drew a throwing star from his weapons harness. He hurled it, catching the newcomer in the back.
The male’s ear-shattering, high pitched scream rent the night as he fell. Wraith slowed, a sudden sense of dread weighing him down, turning him sluggish and uncoordinated.
Something … something wasn’t right. He stumbled, tried to catch himself on the side of a building, but his muscles had turned to water. His vision grew dim, his mouth went dry, and with every breath it felt as if he was taking flames into his lungs.
He tried to reach his cell phone, but his arm wouldn’t work. And then his mind wouldn’t work, and all went black.
Throbbing pain in Wraith’s head woke him, and a serious case of cotton-mouth made him gag. He smelled sickness. Blood. Antiseptic.
Shit, what had he done last night? He’d been clean for months … well, he hadn’t fed on a junkie just for the sake of getting high, anyway. He’d eaten his share of humans and demons who had drugs in their systems, but that hadn’t been why Wraith had chosen them as food. At least, that’s what he’d told himself.
In any case, he hadn’t woken up with a drug or alcohol hangover in months, but this … this was one mother of a hangover.
He peeled open his eyes, the pain convincing him his eyelids were coated on the inside with sandpaper. They watered, and he had to blink several times before he could focus. Through blurry vision he saw chains hanging in loops from a dark ceiling. Low, muted voices blended with the sound of beeping hospital equipment and ringing in his ears. He was at UG.
He should be relieved, comforted to be safe. Instead, his gut wrenched. Clearly, he’d screwed up again, and his brothers were going to chew his ass but good.
Speak of the demons, he thought, as Eidolon and Shade entered the room. Wraith tried to lift his head, but a wave of nausea made the room spin.
“Hey, bro,” Shade said, as he grasped Wraith’s wrist. A warm, pulsing sensation shot up Wraith’s arm. Shade was doing his body probe thing, checking his vitals and whatever other crap needed to be checked. Maybe he could do something about the nausea.
“What’s up?” he croaked. “You boys are wearing your grim faces.” Which meant he’d fucked up even more royally than he’d thought.
Eidolon didn’t smile, not even the fake, doctorish, it’s-going-to-be-okay smile. “What happened the other night?”
“Other night?”
“You’ve been out for two weeks,” E said. “What happened?”
Wraith levered up so fast his head threatened to fall off. “Oh, no. Fuck, no. E, did I kill someone? Did the Council torture you—”
His brothers both pushed him back on the bed. “I’m fine, Wraith. The Vamp Council didn’t summon me for punishment. But I need to know what happened.”
Relief made him sag into the mattress as he searched the black hole that was his memory. An alley. He’d been in an alley. And in pain. But why? “I’m not sure. How did I get here?”
Shade grunted. “I felt your distress. Grabbed a medic team and took a Harrowgate to you.”
“What do you remember?” E asked, jacking up the head of the bed so Wraith could sit up.
He sifted through the fuzzy memories, but piecing them together was like trying to do a jigsaw puzzle while blindfolded. “I was eating a gangbanger. Tasty, surprisingly free of drugs.” He frowned. Had he killed the guy? No, he didn’t think so … remembered closing the punctures. “I felt a sting in my neck. And there was a male. Demon, I think. Why?”
The pulses down his arm stopped, but Shade kept his hand where it was. “You were attacked by an assassin. Sent by Roag.”
“Ah … did you guys miss the bulletin? Roag is gone. For real this time.” Their oldest brother had plotted a gruesome revenge against the three of them, had nearly succeeded. If Wraith never saw the dark depths of a dungeon again, it would be too soon.
Eidolon ran his hand through his short, dark hair. “Yeah, well, he hired the assassin to handle his revenge on us in the event of his death. You must have injured him, because he was in bad shape. Tayla tracked and caught him while Shade was bringing you back here. He confessed everything before Luc ate him.”
“Ate him?”
E nodded. “The assassin was a leopard-shifter. Nothing scares them more than werewolves, so we chained him up in Luc’s basement to get him to talk. We thought we’d secured him far enough away from Luc.” He shrugged. “Apparently not.”
“I love werewolves,” Wraith said, shooting Shade a sly grin. “Guess you’d better not piss off Runa. She might eat you.” Shade had bonded to a werewolf last year, and had been disgustingly happy since. “Why are you here, anyway? Shouldn’t you be helping her with the monsters?”
“You mean the ones you haven’t bothered to come see yet?”
“Shade.” Eidolon’s voice held a soft warning, which was odd. Usually Shade was the voice of reason when it came to handling Wraith.
But ever since Runa had delivered their triplets, Shade had been seriously overprotective and easily offended. He just didn’t get that not everyone went goo-goo over his offspring as much as he did.
Wraith shoved the sheet off his body and saw that he was naked. Not that he cared, but his coat had better not have been ruined when they stripped him. Knowing Shade’s love of trauma shears, Wraith figured odds were good that he’d have to buy another one.
“So why all the doom and gloom? The assassin failed.”
Shade and E exchanged glances, which set Wraith on high alert. This wasn’t good.
“He didn’t fail,” Shade said softly. “The guy has a partner. He’s still out there.”
“So I hunt his ass down and kill him. I don’t see the problem.”
Shade’s pause made Wraith’s gut do a slow slide to his feet. “The problem is that the first assassin shot you with a slow-acting poison dart.”
Wraith snorted. “Is that all? Just shoot me up with the antidote.”
“Remember Roag’s foray into the storeroom?” E asked, and yeah, Wraith remembered. Last year during Roag’s bid for revenge, he’d helped himself to E’s collection of rare artifacts and crap Wraith gathered for him. “One of the things he took was the mordlair necrotoxin. That’s what the assassin used.” E exhaled slowly. “There’s no antidote.”
No antidote? “Then a spell. Find a spell to cure it.” Panic started to fray the edges of his control, and Shade must have sensed it, because his grip grew firmer.
“Wraith, we’ve consulted every text, every shaman, every witch … there’s nothing that can flush the poison from your system.”
“So, bottom line. What are you saying?”
E handed Wraith a mirror. “Take a look at your neck.” He brushed Wraith’s hair back to reveal his personal symbol at the top of his dermoire. The hourglass, which had always appeared full on the bottom, had emerged following his first maturation cycle at the age of twenty.
Wraith inhaled sharply at what he saw now: the hourglass had been inverted, the sand flowing from top to bottom, marking time.
“You’re dying,” Eidolon said. “You have a month, maybe six weeks, to live.”