by Anne Malcom
“And she listens to you?” Alexus continued with wide eyes as he watched me rock back on my heels. “My, we have a lot to talk about, don’t we? This conversation will be interesting.”
Thorne waited a beat. “And this conversation is to be had outside where I’m staring down the barrel of a gun?” he asked, voice even, calm, deadly.
Alexus didn’t miss a beat. “You’ve been off the reservation for some time now, but even you know we don’t let vampires run around without muzzling them. And we certainly don’t invite them in.”
“There’s a first for everything,” I added. “Like me not killing you for insulting me and, in turn, Thorne. Total first for me.”
A small muscle ticked in his jaw, rippling the easy look he was trying so hard to maintain in order to surprise us when the callous warlord or leader or whatever he was came out.
“We have to take precautions. She is known for her body count, and we don’t need any more throats ripped out. That’s what they do. Vampires, in case you haven’t forgotten, rip throats out in order to drink the blood of human beings.”
I smiled at him, showing fang. “Well I don’t rip out throats for sustenance. Too messy. It’s merely for recreational purposes, if that helps.”
He glared at me, then Thorne. “You’re taking up with that? And letting it train our men?”
Obviously someone had been chatting if he knew about that.
“Considering she saved the entire New York faction, yeah, I let her fuckin’ train them,” Thorne snapped. “And considering she’s the most beautiful fuckin’ woman on this planet and I love her, yeah, I took up with her. We really goin’ to talk about this here?”
“I will talk out here until I believe my men aren’t at risk,” he returned.
I rolled my eyes. “Dude, you’re not at risk. We can’t snack on you on account of the whole ‘your blood kills us’ thing. So you’re not likely to get drained, and Thorne asked me a big favor in not killing you. For the greater good, apparently. The greater good being your continued survival and some information on the war that’s brewing and has been going on while you’ve been having Mexican standoffs in the middle of a secret survival slayer compound parking lot.” I paused, looking around. “Though, you could’ve just painted a big old sign on the roof saying ‘All ye vampires come, the slayers live here.’ Secrets are meant to be secrets, and you just blew your own cat of the bag.” I shook my head. “I mean, dude, a warehouse in the middle of bumfuck nowhere with security that would likely only keep out a miscreant human or two. But a miscreant vampire?” I did a finger wave. “Miscreant vampire on the premises, with little to no effort.”
“Isla,” Thorne muttered, his mouth twitching.
I gave him an innocent look. “What? This is like our version of meeting the family, right? They’re showing me who they are with semiautomatic weapons, and I’ll show them who I am with sarcasm, fangs, a great witty repertoire, an even better ass, and some saucy dismemberment if they don’t lower their fucking weapons from my boyfriend.” The last part was uttered in much the same tone as the rest of my monologue, but I moved my slightly vacant and what some might call insane smile to Alexus. “Now how about we go talk about that truce.”
“A prophecy?” Alexus repeated, leaning back in his seat with a blank look on his face, much like some businessman would when he was presented with some form of information he knew he was far too smart to believe. “You come here, risk everything we’ve built, everything we are, as well as breaking everything we stand for by sleeping with this creature instead of killing it, and you tell me that it’s all dreamed up by the gods and communicated by a witch?” he surmised.
My hand flinched on Thorne’s thigh. His covered mine.
“It’s also written down in a very old book,” I offered through clenched teeth. “And old books are like the Internet. If it’s written, then it must be true.”
“You’ve known me for centuries, Alexus. We might have our disagreements, but that doesn’t mean you don’t know what kind of man I am. What I would do for our society. That I would never risk it if I wasn’t sure. There’s a war coming. You’ve seen the hybrids. You lost three men to them yesterday alone.”
“And we exterminated the vile abominations,” he protested defensively.
“And how many were there? Two?” Duncan cut in. “You couldn’t shoot more than that in a bucket. You sure as hell couldn’t win a war against them. Though I’d be happy to see you try, since slayers on this earth are nothing but an annoyance, like lasses who won’t bed ye until you marry them. I’ll do it, marry the lasses or save the fuckin’ slayers, because the end result is the same: I get fucked. Only one in the good way. But I’m getting paid for this, so all is not lost.”
His eyes moved to the one woman in the room who wasn’t me. He’d obviously clocked her the moment he walked in, because she had boobs and a vagina and was not hard to look at.
Yes, she was wearing the unflattering female version of the male outfit, but even the shapeless garb hinted at her slim figure and gentle curves. And her dirty blonde hair was slicked back into a tight bun, harshly showing her makeup-less face. Yet she had a soft sprinkling of freckles and sun-kissed skin to counteract the whole GI Jane look she had going, making her look slightly younger and softer.
But her violet-blue eyes that didn’t belong to the childish and pretty face told me that she wasn’t soft. That the world had done to her what it did to a lot of humans—fucked them over. And there were two options when the world did that. People might argue that point, but people were idiots.
You either gave up, let the world continue to fuck you while you coped with alcohol, drugs or just by letting the monotony of life become something that you accepted and didn’t change until you died from an overdose or suicide or just a fucking boring heart.
Or you got even.
By doing something with your life to prove to the universe that it couldn’t get you down. Working hard to fight back—not just with fists, but they helped—so you died from a heart attack brought on by the stress that came with fighting or with a knife in your heart or fangs at your neck.
Those were the two options. There were variations on the methods in which those options went, but there was one thing in common with them both.
Death.
You made a choice on how to live that ultimately was your choice on how to die.
With fire in your belly and fight in your heart, or with weakness in your soul and a tasteless nothing on your tongue.
She was a fire kind of girl.
So that, in addition to her freckles, her eyes and the fact that she had a vagina and breasts, gave Duncan his pause.
“I thought I might only get fucked one good way in that analogy. Wanna change that?” His eyes twinkled and the teasing and crassness of his statement combined with his rough accent and not-disagreeable physique would’ve made a lot of women melt.
But when you were the fire, had it inside you, you weren’t likely to melt, even at a Scottish vampire with cheekbones to cut glass, muscles to rival even Thorne’s and a twinkle in his eye that told you he’d give you the best orgasms of your life.
But then the fangs meant they might be the last ones you’d ever get.
She tilted her head as the man beside her stiffened more than the rest already had.
“You know what I want to change? More than anything?” she asked sweetly.
He folded his arms, leaning back so his chair balanced on two legs. “Your capacity for pleasure? ’Cause I can do that. And pain. But I promise you’ll like it.”
She gave him a look, shaking her head slowly and seductively. Then something whizzed through the air as her hand moved with impressive speed. The knife landed right beside Duncan’s ear, the gentle hum of the enchanted blade vibrating in the air.
“What I what to change is the ‘un’ in ‘undead,’” she said sweetly. “If you want to get fucked so bad, I’ll feed you to the succubi in the dungeon. After I kill y
ou, of course.”
The resounding silence in the room was more like a roar, hard faces on everyone.
Well, not everyone. I was grinning.
I elbowed Thorne. “I like her,” I stage-whispered.
Duncan gaped at her, and then he grinned too. Because he was a cocky asshole, he yanked the blade from the wall and ran his tongue along the cold, enchanted metal that would most likely be excruciating to touch, let alone lick.
“Well, we’ve decided to start the foreplay with pain. I approve, lassie,” he growled.
She glared.
I continued to grin. “Seriously? Do you think she’d want to go for cocktails after this?” I asked Thorne. “Or do you think the whole me being a vampire thing might stop her from wanting to share a cosmo with me?”
Thorne’s hand squeezed mine once more. “Let’s make sure they don’t try and kill you before drinks,” he murmured. Then he looked to the table. “Such an attempt wouldn’t be wise, considering not only would you start a fucking war with my faction, but I’d likely make it so this one was burning to the ground when I walked away from it, covered in your blood.”
His fury and the cold certainty of the threat did things to me. Things that made me move my hand higher on his thigh. His hand was firm enough to stop me before I got to the goods.
He gave me a look, still tinged with the promise of murder—which, of course, only turned me on more.
“What? You can’t do things like promise mass murder and then not expect me to get all hot for you,” I told him innocently.
His eyes darkened slightly before he was back to business, focusing on the man at the head of the table gaping in disgust, rage and more than a little bit of fear.
Thorne scared him.
Not because his threat was real but because for whatever reason, the charade he was playing as some leader of some faction of slayers in the middle of nowhere was just that. Thorne was playing a part too, coming to him and pretending like he had the upper hand when Thorne had it all along. I didn’t know the hierarchy of the slayer life, but I knew what a pissing contest looked like. And I knew what it looked like to win one, considering I won at… well, everything.
“You’re betraying everything we stand for,” he hissed.
Thorne eyed him. “No. We stand for the protection of the innocent and those who can’t protect themselves. I’m making sure that I’m doing that.”
“By making a deal with the Devil?”
“No, I’m not the Devil. Not even really related, just distant cousins,” I cut in. “Though I am a big fan of his work.”
Narrowed eyes around the table were the only response.
“Making a deal with the Devil would be making no deal at all,” Thorne said calmly. “Would be to clutch to millennia-old prejudice in order to hold onto a distorted form of nobility you think you have. Which you don’t. Not if being noble means being stupid. And stupidity can’t be an excuse when you’re hundreds of years old, which means that’s malice. So no, I’m not making a deal with the Devil, or sleeping with one. If that’s what you also want to insinuate.” His hand flexed in mine. “But if you’re going to continue with your stupidity, I might just be looking at someone doing his work for him.”
I grinned wider at the pinched way Alexus’s face went at Thorne’s words.
My man was kicking ass.
“And just so you know, the council knows that, should I decide it to be so, I can make it so the war fought on the outside isn’t what kills us all,” Thorne continued, eyes narrowing on the man at the head of the table. “I can make one on the inside that does that.”
He gave him a pointed look, though I didn’t really understand why Alexus paled so much at it. Sure, Thorne did a great homicidal look, almost better than me—almost being the operative word there—but he’d been doing that since we’d walked into this little party.
I was someone who didn’t leave things unsaid or hinted at anything. I would rather threaten someone up front; it saved time and was just part of my persona.
Thorne obviously didn’t roll that way because his words were saying something to Alexus without actually coming out and saying it.
The rest of the table seemed to be as confused as I was—apart from Silver, who was sitting on Thorne’s other side. He was grinning.
Well, that pissed me right off. Silver knew something I didn’t. I would have to have words with Thorne. Serious words.
But the silence that descended after his vague threat was something that even I hesitated to fill. It was loaded with an energy that communicated the precipice of the entire rest of the night.
Whether it would end in blood and death, or whether the blood and death would come at a later date instead.
That’s what all moments seemed to be these days and nights: a slight escape from the battle I had tasted since the moment Thorne’s blood was on my tongue.
Because something didn’t taste sweet without destruction to follow.
Alexus cracked his knuckles and held his jaw so tight it looked like his teeth could possibly shatter under the exertion of such a motion.
One could hope.
Instead, I was disappointed to see that he used his mouth for something else.
“This is not a truce. Nor is it permanent. This is only until this war is over. Then we fight our true enemy,” Alexus gave me a long and pointed look as the hate in the room increased tenfold.
I may have only been able to sense Thorne’s emotions, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t see the rage from the rest of the inhabitants of this meeting to understand they were not down with this decision at all.
I really hoped someone decided to be a bad little boy and try to kill me anyway, just so I could kill someone.
“Oh, our true enemy?” Thorne said, standing stiffly, hand at his belt and the other at my waist. The way he eyed the room before focusing on Alexus told me he sensed the same rage in the air.
Silver was poised for battle too.
Duncan still leaned leisurely on the wall, but his eyes glowed with something that told me he was also craving a fight.
We were vampires, after all.
“Our true enemy,” Thorne continued, “is death. Not those who cheat it. And we would be rather hypocritical if that indeed was our purpose, to eliminate all those considered deathless.” He squeezed my hip. “And this order, to ensure no one lays a finger on Isla, it’s as permanent as death itself. Because that’s the only thing that’s gonna ensure I don’t come after every single one of you and your families should you decide to come after what’s mine. Even then, I won’t let the grave stop me because I don’t expect to let it hold me for long.” He paused. “Not that Isla can’t take care of herself. She’d likely kill whoever tried to come within five feet of her.”
“Oh I’d let them come within five feet,” I added. “I need a workout every now and then. And I like to make it last. Death, that is. It’s permanent, after all.” I paused. “For slayers, at least. And especially when I’m the one dealing it.”
Thorne glanced to me, his eyes dark. “Those who make that decision will have to hope Isla is the one who kills you. Because she might be a vampire, but I’m a fucking man, and anyone who touches my woman or threatens her immortality is one who will never die. I’ll make sure of that. You’ll spend eternity in fuckin’ hell between the underworld and earth.”
And on that, he half dragged me out.
And I let him.
Because fuck, was that one hell of a parting note.
Chapter 12
One Week Later
“Ugh,” I groaned, opening the door.
I left it open as I twirled around to walk back into my living room and pour myself a drink. I sure as shit needed one. “Because the first thing I want to wake up to is the king of all vampires, AKA the one who tried to have me executed.”
The door closed as Rick sauntered into the room. “You must get over that incident at some point. Plus, it has been clarified, many times
, that I hadn’t planned on executing you. Merely torturing you in front of a crowd before letting you get away with your undeath,” he commented dryly.
I glanced at him over my shoulder. He was, like always, clean-shaven and wearing an immaculate suit, dusky gray this time with a crisp white shirt open at the collar, exposing his tanned and impressive neck. And he was somewhat making a joke.
I turned my attention back to my glass and the liquid I’d poured into it.
“Whatever,” I dismissed. “I miss out on anything interesting—and by interesting, I mean any mass murders and such—since I’ve been napping?”
Things had been rather uneventful since we got back from Oklahoma, with truces—unprecedented as they were—on both sides giving us somewhat of a lull in the assassination attempts. They’d come, surely, but for now, it was the calm before the storm.
I didn’t like that. I liked the storm. Which was why I was getting more and more frustrated at the lack of action in seeking out the witches. Apparently war was just a lot of waiting around and then high concentrations of drama and blood in short periods of time.
True, there was still drama and blood in this past week because I was… well, me.
I’d finally had to succumb to laevisomnus after Thorne got more than a little testy. And my slow reactions got my arm ripped out of its socket by a hybrid who’d gotten the best of me while we exterminated a nest of them.
I didn’t really get what his problem was. It grew back.
But he’d been alarmed enough to demand Scott and Duncan take care of the rest, then dragged me and my newly growing arm back to my apartment and ordered me to “get some fucking sleep before I fuck you into unconsciousness.”
Obviously, I’d let him fuck me into unconsciousness.
And then I’d woken to him sitting right next to my bed, hands resting on his chin, watching me.
“Dude, have you been watching me sleep for—”I snatched my phone from the nightstand, glancing at the date. “—four days? If so, that’s three days too many and takes it into creepy territory.”