by Tina Folsom
Haven ushered the girl toward the car door and lifted Yvette’s limp body into his arms, carrying her and placing her onto the back bench of the limo as Kimberly stepped inside. He could only hope that she stayed unconscious for the length of the car ride, otherwise he’d have to fall back on option one. Of course, if she remained unconscious when he brought her to the witch, it meant he’d have to carry her again and feel her body close to his. And that presented a whole other issue: one his brain wanted to avoid and his cock looked forward to.
“One more scream, and you’ll end up like her.”
With frightened eyes, Kimberly nodded, one arm wrapped around her waist, the other stretched out toward Yvette. “Why won’t she let go of my wrist?”
Haven didn’t know for sure, but he figured it had something to do with her vampire powers. “Hate to break it to you, kid, but your bodyguard’s a vampire.”
Six
“You idiot, you should have killed her immediately!” Bess hissed, her mouth distorting into an ugly grimace.
Haven was back in her makeshift living area, back amongst the disgusting smells and sights of her witchcraft.
“In front of the girl?” he asked, knowing it was a weak excuse. But he couldn’t admit to her that he’d had scruples about taking Yvette’s life. If only he hadn’t met her and spoken to her at the party, he would have never developed a conscience about it. But now? Damn it, how could he kill her now?
“She’ll get over it. Do it now while she’s still out.”
Haven shook his head, his mind frantically scrambling for another excuse. “We don’t know what’ll happen. Her hand is still attached to the girl. What if it affects Kimberly? What if she gets injured or killed? I’m assuming you want the girl alive …”
“Mmm.” The witch’s face distorted, frown lines building on her forehead. Good, she was contemplating it. As farfetched as his statement was, maybe Bess was too superstitious to take any risks. He sure didn’t want any more blood on his hands than he already had. Not even the blood of a vampire. It was bad enough that he’d delivered both of them to the witch. Once he had his brother back, the two of them could figure out how to free the innocent girl before the witch could harm her. As for Yvette? He had no clue what to do about her. Nor should he even waste a single thought on her.
“Fine,” she finally agreed.
Haven let out a relieved breath. One hurdle was jumped over. Now to the next one. “Good, so you have everything you want.”
“Indeed.”
“Now, give me back my brother, and we’ll be out of your hair.”
And back again as soon as we can figure out how to wrench Kimberly from your evil clutches.
She gave him a smile. “As you just said, I now have everything I want.”
Her measured speech made him listen up. Something wasn’t right. Suspicion made the little hairs on his arms stand up in alert.
“Kimberly, your brother, and you. All three of you.”
Haven swallowed hard, not liking where the conversation was going. “You gave your word.”
“I lied.”
He took a step toward her, ready to throttle her. With her hand raised, she pushed an invisible shield toward him, holding him in place. God, how he hated witches! At least with a vampire he could fight in hand-to-hand combat. He hadn’t planned on fighting her this time around. All he’d figured was to try and get his brother out, then come back in full force as a team. One of them would distract her while the other attacked. On his own, he knew he had no chance. He was powerless against her magic—as the son of a witch, he knew just how powerless.
“Give me back my brother and let us go!”
“Sorry, can’t do that. I need all three of you.”
He hated being outgunned. “You fucking bitch!”
She made a dismissive hand movement. “You can call me all you want. I really don’t care what you think.”
“What do you want with us?” Maybe if he could find out what was going on, he could figure out a way to escape and get his brother out alive.
“Now that would be telling, wouldn’t it? I’m not in the sharing mood today. But I’m grateful—that’s why I’ll let you keep your stake when I lock you up with the vamp.”
Double-shit!
As soon as Yvette woke, she would attack him. And then he would have no choice but to kill her after all.
“You can’t do that!”
“Really? Watch me.”
“Listen, the bitch is going to kill me.” Of that he was certain. Then he ventured a guess. “And I figure you want me alive.” He sure hoped so; otherwise, wouldn’t she have killed him already?
“True, but as a big, bad bounty hunter and vampire slayer I count on your ingenuity. You might just have to kill the vamp before she kills you.”
Manipulative witch!
That’s what she was doing, getting him to do her dirty work for her. By locking him up with Yvette, she was forcing him to kill the vamp bitch to save his own hide before she took a bite out of it. Now he hated her even more.
“I’ve done everything you asked.”
“I’m sorry. Did you want a thank you? Here you go: thank you!” Then she pushed more power against him, pressing him against the wall behind. “Time to join your friends.”
Less than a minute later, she’d forced him into a large, sparsely furnished room. Three cots were lined up along one wall, a few pillows and blankets strewn about, a small fridge and table with a few chairs in another corner. An open door in the opposite corner showed a rudimentary toilet and a small sink.
Kimberly lay on one cot and Yvette on the one next to her, her hand still clamped around Kimberly’s wrist. She was still unconscious. Kimberly was curled up in a ball, crying. He searched the rest of the room.
“Where is Wesley?” he yelled.
“You’ll see him when I’m done with him,” Bess answered from the other side of the already closed door.
Kimberly jerked up from her prone position and pressed herself against the wall behind her. “You!”
He shrugged. “Well, honey, looks like we’re all in the same boat now.” And he’d been the one who’d delivered them all into the hands of the devious witch. Which meant he was the one who was responsible for getting them out.
“You bastard! You kidnapped me. Get out! I don’t want to see you here. Leave me alone!” Kimberly tossed her head in Yvette’s direction, her look weary.
“I can’t do that. I’m imprisoned just like you.”
“That’s a trick! What do you want? Money?”
He ignored her question. “Listen, we have to work together now to get out of here.”
Kimberly shook her head. “Why should I trust you? You got me in here in the first place. You attacked us, and you took out my bodyguard.”
“Your bodyguard is a vampire.”
She glanced at Yvette once more. “Yeah, you said that in the car already. I heard you. There’s no need to try to confuse me. I’m not a dumb blonde, you know. I’m not even a blonde. Vampires don’t exist, so I don’t know what you’re playing at. I want to go home now.”
Haven sighed. He’d have his work cut out. “We all want to go home. But that’s not going to happen right now. So, listen, here’s the deal …”
***
Zane used his key to Gabriel’s house when nobody responded to his knocking. It appeared that the doorbell had still not been repaired. He stomped into the foyer and listened for voices. The house was quiet except for the muffled voices coming from the basement where Maya had set up her medical practice a few months earlier.
He hated to intrude, but what he needed to report was urgent.
He slunk down the stairs as stealthily as always. It had become such a habit that even now, when he was visiting his boss’ house, he approached silently, as if closing in on prey. It was strange how some habits were so ingrained in his psyche that even consciously he couldn’t rid himself of them. He knew it creeped his colleagues out. B
ut hey, everybody had a reputation to uphold.
Zane heard the voices clearly now. They came from Maya’s examination room.
“No, this is the foot, and that’s the umbilical cord,” Maya explained.
Great! That meant Delilah and Samson were here for Delilah’s ultrasound. He should have guessed. Delilah was now seven months pregnant, and when he’d seen her last week, she’d looked like she was ready to drop the baby right there and then.
“She looks big,” Samson commented.
“She is. So, would you guys please tell me how you know it’s a girl? I don’t recall ever telling you the sex,” Maya said.
The smile in Delilah’s voice was evident when she responded. “She talks to me. I think she’s got a gift.”
“Telepathy?” Maya asked.
“I think so.”
“Congratulations! That’ll make a lot of things easier for you. Every mother will envy you for understanding your child even when it can’t talk yet. I suppose she hasn’t yet told you when she’s ready, has she? I think you might deliver earlier than with a human pregnancy. All signs point to it.”
“Just as well,” Delilah answered.
“I know it’s hard on you.” Samson’s voice was comforting, and Zane shook his head. He just couldn’t wrap his mind around how all these badass vampires turned into pussies once they were bonded. What a crock! Sure wasn’t gonna happen to him.
“I’m not worried about me. I’m worried about you. You barely feed from me lately.”
Delilah did have a point. Samson was looking a little worse for wear these days, and Zane had suspected that he’d lowered his intake of blood. As a vampire blood-bonded to a human, he could only drink from his mate, and it appeared that he wanted to be mindful of Delilah’s pregnancy. It was different for vampires blood-bonded to other vampires as was the case with Maya and Gabriel. While they could feed off each other, one partner had to keep feeding off human blood in order to maintain the strength for the pair.
“I’m fine, sweetness.”
Before he hurled over all that lovey-dovey swill, Zane knocked on the door and entered.
“Sorry to intrude.”
Samson instantly covered Delilah’s bare belly with a blanket and rose to block Zane’s view of his wife. “You’d better have a good reason for barging in here.”
Vampires and their possessiveness about their mates—God, how he hated that. “I do. Where’s Gabriel?”
“Meeting with the Mayor,” Maya responded as she switched off the ultrasound machine and tucked away her instruments.
“Call him. We have a situation.”
“What’s going on?” Samson was all business now, and despite his tired look, there was determination in his hazel eyes.
“Yvette didn’t call in.”
“Did you page her?”
“No answer.”
“Her cell?”
“Goes straight to voicemail.”
“Have Thomas see whether he can activate the GPS chip in her cell remotely.”
Zane wasn’t a novice; he’d already called Thomas on his way over. “He’s already working on it.”
“Good.”
“Her client didn’t show up at her hotel either.”
“At least that probably means they are still together.” Samson ran his hand through his thick dark hair. For a moment, Zane was distracted. He missed having hair and being able to ruffle it. When he was human, he’d been shorn bald for the experiments they’d conducted on him, and since his hair hadn’t yet grown back when he’d been turned into a vampire, he was stuck forever with a head like Yul Brunner. Yeah, life sucked that way.
“The limousine they were supposed to take after the party has disappeared too.”
“You think the driver could have abducted them?”
“I wouldn’t eliminate that possibility.”
“Let’s see whether we can get a location on the limo. Find out if it was equipped with Lo-Jack and we can track it that way. If not, have the boys comb the city for it,” Samson suggested. “I’ll talk to Gabriel and have him mount an all-out search. It’s not like Yvette not to respond. Something is fishy.”
“I agree.”
As much as Zane couldn’t stand the prickly bitch, Yvette was part of his family, the only family he had. And he’d move heaven and earth to keep his family together. He wasn’t going to lose this one too. He’d had to watch his first family perish under horrendous circumstances. It had cut too deep, the pain still fresh even after over sixty-five years. “I’ll check out her house in the meantime.”
Seven
The first thing Yvette felt when she woke was long hair caressing her neck and shoulders. It instantly told her that she’d been out for more than two hours, the minimum hours of restorative sleep needed to make her hair grow back. The second thing she noticed was the fact that her hand was clamped around somebody’s wrist.
Still slightly out of sorts and dizzy, Yvette forced her heavy eyelids open and shot up from her prone position, releasing Kimberly’s wrist with her next breath. Her sudden movement made her vision blur, and she took a second to steady herself. Blood thundered through her veins, the noise no less jarring than a passing freight train, swallowing any other sound in the room.
Yvette took a breath, filling her lungs with air, but her brain couldn’t process the scents that assaulted her—an aftereffect of whatever had knocked her out, for sure.
Yvette glanced at Kimberly, who immediately backed away from her, frightened and intimidated.
Were her eyes glowing red or her fangs showing? She slid her tongue over her teeth, realizing to her relief that her fangs hadn’t descended involuntarily; however, how would she explain her suddenly long hair to her? “Are you okay, Kimberly? Did he hurt you?”
The girl shook her head. “You’re a vampire. I didn’t wanna believe it.” Her tear-stained eyes were wide with fear.
Shit! How had she figured it out? Yvette’s mind worked overtime, trying to piece together the memories of the fight with her attacker. Had she shown her fangs during the fight? Yvette shook her head and looked down at Kimberly’s wrist where her hand had left a red imprint. It was a survival mechanism: a vampire could lock his hands around an object to hold on to it, freezing it into place if channeling all energy to it. If knocked out by any unknown force, it would assure not being swept away or taken to another location. In this case, it had made sure that Yvette couldn’t be separated from her charge. How she would explain this to Kimberly, she didn’t quite know.
“I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you, but I did need to protect you.”
Kimberly continued shaking her head, as if denying it would magically make it not true, not real. Reality sucked, but Yvette didn’t have the luxury of believing it could be undone. The girl had already seen too much; it was best to come clean right now. Or maybe she should wipe her memory right now, make her forget what she’d seen—but only if she couldn’t handle the truth.
“Listen to me. I’m still here to protect you, no matter what. What I am doesn’t matter. I won’t hurt you.”
The girl sniffed. Where had all her bubbly personality gone? Right now, Yvette wouldn’t mind her endless chatter; at least, it would tell her that her charge was all right. She sucked in a deep breath, trying to think clearly of how to assure her that she was no threat, when an all-too-familiar scent tickled her nostrils.
Yvette shot up from the cot and lunged at the person leaning against the wall over her left shoulder: Haven, the fucking asshole who’d attacked them. She slammed him against the concrete, pinning him.
“I’m going to kill you, you bastard!”
Through clenched teeth, he hissed at her, “We’re in the same fucking boat.”
She dismissed his words. A coward and a liar—she sure knew how to pick ‘em. Yvette’s fangs itched, and she made no effort to disguise them. As they descended and pushed past her lips, she snarled at him. But instead of seeing fear in his eyes, she saw defi
ance, bright and hot.
“Release us, now!”
“I can’t: I’m imprisoned just like you are—so let go of me.”
Yvette’s eyebrows drew together as she frowned. What the fuck was he talking about?
Without loosening her grip, her eyes scanned the room. She’d been too dazed up to now to take in her surroundings. But there was no time like the present. There was a door built into one wall and a boarded-up window in another. Neither would provide an insurmountable obstacle to escape. Another door at the other end of the room was open; she spotted a toilet behind it.
Could he have told the truth? Yvette shook off the thought. No, he was a liar.
“Don’t mind if I find that hard to believe,” she snorted. “Last time I checked, you were the one who attacked us.”
“He’s telling the truth,” Kimberly’s voice came from behind her.
Yvette glanced back at her charge, trying to assess whether Kimberly was in shock. What kind of crap had Haven fed her while Yvette was unconscious? Turning back to the bastard, she narrowed her eyes.
“I should kill you right here, right now. You know why I won’t?”
“Because you still want my dick?”
She slapped him across the face. How dare he trifle with her? “You’re still alive because I’m not going to subject Kimberly to such gore. But the second she’s safe, I’m coming after you.”
“I figured you’d bear a grudge against me.” He shrugged, his face giving nothing away.
Yvette ignored his comment. “Where are we?”
“In a warehouse in the outskirts of San Francisco.”
“Where exactly?” She pressed her arm tighter across his chest, forcing the air out of his lungs.
“South San Francisco, off the 101.”
“How did we get here?”
Haven visibly fought for air, and in the interest of getting an answer to her question, she released her hold by a fraction. When he pulled in a few breaths, she kicked her knee upwards, aiming for his balls. To her surprise, he blocked her by tilting his hips sideways so her knee merely dug into his thigh. She was slower than usual—a fact she attributed to the substance that had knocked her out cold. But just as her sense of smell had come back, she was sure her other senses would catch up soon.