by Michele Hauf
Even your unwanted kisses.
He wished she hadn’t reacted so offensively to his kiss. But why should he have expected anything even close to acceptance?
“Well, that’s a one hundred percent improvement.” Lark leaned against the bathroom door frame.
He set down the comb and spread out his arms for her to inspect. “I feel like a new bit of tatter.”
“You look great.”
He rubbed his smooth jaw, momentarily forgetting his real life, and taking on the suave he’d once possessed around women. “You think I’m handsome?”
Her dark brow quirked above eyes that were so dark he couldn’t determine if they were midnight-blue or moss-deep-emerald. Lark, of the sparkling eyes and naturally rosy lips.
Not a bird. Don’t crush her. Or do! Yes, crush the mortal hunter—
“I’ll give you handsome,” she said, and strolled back into the living room.
“Really?” Had she just pronounced him attractive?
Domingos followed eagerly, a puppy that had been tossed a bone, and then he realized he was acting like a puppy that had just been patted on the head and he assumed a nonchalant, careless posture, not meeting her eyes. He could do casual with the best of them. “How much time left?”
“Six hours, give or take. Enough to give you a good head start. You going to leave?”
“Do you want me to?” Please say no. Don’t reject me.
“I need to shower, eat and...get things in order.”
That was a yes. It sure as hell hadn’t been a no.
“Now that I’m clean it’ll be harder to track my scent. Or wait.” He sniffed the air, noting the fruity scent. “Now I understand. You had me shower and use that smelly cherry shampoo so now you can track me even better. Well played, hunter. Very clever.”
“Leave, Domingos. I can’t do this.”
“Do what?”
“Be friendly with the guy on my hit list. It’s not working.”
“I think it is working.”
“It’s not supposed to work!”
“And you are losing your cool.”
He stepped up to her, his bare feet landing on the rough, flat rug before the sofa. He stood but inches from her body, defying her to look him in the eye, to see that he had once been like her. Human. Capable of emotion and—hell, all those other things he couldn’t grasp at the moment.
“Don’t do that.”
“Stop me,” he defied, not sure if she would stand good on her word, but prepared to go on the defense if she did not. “Does the big bad vampire with the broken fangs scare you?”
“Nothing scares me anymore.”
“Anymore? What used to scare you, Lark?” He took another step, and she didn’t back away, boldly holding position. He liked the challenge of her. It kept back the whispers. “Monsters under the bed?”
“Please.”
“Snakes? Spiders? Creepy crawlies?”
After a thoughtful pause, she said, “Falling.”
He noted her cool composure. Truly, not scared. She was a trained killer, through and through. And yet he’d just peeled back a thin layer from her hard exterior. “So, on the roof last night?”
She nodded.
“That’s the only reason I was able to kiss you. Because you were afraid of falling.”
“You think I’d ask to be kissed by a man with fangs?”
He ran his tongue along a fang, cursing the fact that he could not will them up as any normal vampire could. UV sickness had really worked a number on him.
A violin screeched in his brain. He caught his head against a palm.
“What is it?”
“Nothing but my own madness. Time to leave you.” As if mocking him, the violin played a series of notes that mimicked what he’d just spoken. “But not without one final plea for my life.”
Domingos slid his arms around Lark’s back. Pulling her to him, he bowed to kiss her. He wished his fangs were not down, but so be it. He was bruised, broken and beyond repair. The hunter would have to deal with it. He did not want to risk cutting her and tried his best not to let the fangs graze her lips too hard.
Warm in his embrace, her body felt liquid and bright, something that would never again be his to own. Tender, yet strong, she was a prize he had not earned, could never rightfully own.
When she gasped, he opened her mouth with his, but did not dash out his tongue. Too presumptuous. And the danger of poking her was real. He pressed a palm to her jaw and bowed his forehead against hers.
“Too sweet,” he murmured. “Never again mine.”
Dashing for the door, Domingos fled the temptation of softness that had been stripped from his life by the werewolves’ heartless blood games.
* * *
“He said he didn’t know what sweet was,” Lark said as she stroked a finger over her mouth. The rasp of his parting words had brushed her jaw and she still felt the tingle of that touch warming her skin.
Twice now the enemy had kissed her. And she couldn’t deny that her curiosity for the enigmatic vampire was growing stronger.
A kiss could be used to manipulate—by both of them. But she sensed no untoward intentions from Domingos. And that worried her. Because she liked a challenge. She needed that challenge to feel pride for a job well done. If the vamp was just going to stand back and let her at him with stake at the ready, what was the thrill in that?
As well, it mattered little whether she liked him or despised the very marrow in his breed’s bones; if the vampire wouldn’t stop kissing her she’d never be able to stake him. Never would she be able to move on to number seventy-three, and seventy-four, and so on. She’d be stuck, paused.
Because a kiss...? Well. Such intimacy. Their bodies needn’t even touch, only their mouths, breathing, tasting, granting permission. And in such a startling manner. She honestly did not know how to deal with it.
Lark closed the door and leaned against it. “What do I do now?”
Rook would slap her soundly and tell her to get a grip. If Todd were still alive he would—
“No,” she whispered. “He’s gone. When can I finally bury him so that my heart can move on?”
Only after she’d achieved her goal. A goal that had suddenly stalled at number seventy-two.
Chapter 6
Lark snapped upright on the sofa. The digital alarm on her cell phone played the opening notes to the Brandenburg concerto. Earlier in the evening she’d set it to go off at midnight, knowing she was tired and would probably doze after she’d showered and ordered in Greek.
With the stoic resignation she’d gained during her training, she turned off the alarm and padded into the bedroom. Behind a secret door in the closet she found full Order gear: Kevlar-lined leather trousers, Kevlar vest over a T-shirt, cleric’s coat and leather gloves. Inside the coat and around her belt she wore three titanium stakes, a syringe filled with holy water (worked on baptized vamps), a pistol with silver bullets (would kill a werewolf but only slow down a vampire) and numerous nonstandard-issue blades that she’d used more often than any of the other weapons.
She had no idea whether or not Domingos had been baptized. Didn’t matter. The physical fight was her strong point. Up close and in their face was the only way to bring vampires down. Rook often chided her for taking the risk of putting herself so close to the opponent, but she’d argued that staking required close contact anyway, so why stake them and make it easy when a fight served to ignite her need for vengeance?
The physical struggle actually soothed something deep in her soul. It was the only way she could do what she did. And if she began to question her motivations, then she’d be lost.
She pulled her straight black hair into a tight ponytail and fluffed her bangs. A little eyeliner and some lip gloss
(just because she was on the hunt didn’t mean she had to look like a pale ghost), and then she stepped into the pair of running shoes she’d packed. The soles on these had better traction than the Doc Martens she normally wore. The boots were outfitted with hinged blades she utilized often during the fight, but tonight she wanted stealth.
Because she knew exactly where to look for Domingos LaRoque.
She locked the front door and strode down the outer walkway that hugged the building, and headed back inside to the main hallway. Smoothing away a strand of hair from her mouth, she touched her lips and experienced a flash of kissing the vampire, of feeling his seeking mouth against hers and of not at all reacting defensively to the hard slide of his fangs. He’d had to be careful not to cut her. At the moment she’d felt the fangs her blood had run cold, and yet the kiss had been too amazing for her to want him to stop.
As had been their first kiss up on the roof. After her initial horror, that is.
Lark sighed and shook her head miserably. It had been too long since she’d been kissed if she was thinking vampire kisses rocked. Either that or crazy was a communicable disease.
She tugged open the roof-access door and made her way up the rubber-padded concrete stairs, stealthily, a stake gripped at her side. She emerged in the warm summer night air. Moonlight sparkled on the tin eaves, but Lark didn’t admire the beauty. Instead she strode over to the man sitting on the mansard roof, leaning back on his elbows, bare toes jutting over the edge.
“Thought I’d find you here.”
“According to the last church bells I heard, it’s past midnight,” he said without looking up at her. “Time’s up.”
Now the moonlight would not allow her to ignore the beauty surrounding her—and that right in front of her. The vampire had cleaned up well. Lark had never been interested in men with long hair—or vampires, for that matter—and had always preferred clean-cut blonds. The fresh-from-the-beach-volleyball-game and I’m-so-healthy-I-beam look appealed to her standards for health and fitness. Maybe it was Domingos’s straight nose, or the way the shadows played across his newly shaven jaw? Couldn’t be the fangs that peeked out between his lips. Nor could it be the pale, almost translucent skin that reminded her of pearls and fine things Lark had once liked to lay against her skin.
Something about him...
Then again, this one would never enjoy the sun on a sandy beach anytime soon.
“You’re making this too easy.” She stalked over to him, straddled his outstretched legs and crouched, slamming the flat base of the stake against his chest. The knights called their stake the death punch. She liked that term.
Lark peered into his unflinching gaze, not expecting him to return a defiant look, and he did not. “Say goodbye, vampire.”
“Goodbye, vampire.”
“I’m serious. I thought you wanted to live.”
“I do. I have over a dozen werewolves left to take out.”
“Then what if I promised not to stake you if you promise to leave the rest of pack Levallois alone?”
What was she saying?
“Can’t do that,” Domingos said. He eyed the stake. “I stand by my word, as I would expect you to stand by yours.”
Lark gritted her teeth, gripping the stake more firmly. All it required was one squeeze of her fingers about the paddles and the spring-loaded stake would eject out from the cylinder. The power of the release was so forceful it always bounced her fist upon the victim’s chest. It needed to be that strong to permeate fabric, flesh, bone and finally, the thick, sinewy heart muscle.
Once the vampire’s heart burst, it was dead. There was no coming back from a stake through the heart. She certainly didn’t believe the urban legend about the one vampire who had survived a stake by keeping it in and allowing it to slowly heal, thus pushing out the stake.
“Lark?”
Why she had given him her name was beyond her reason. Too intimate, that. Almost as intimate as a kiss.
Domingos’s eyes were soft, glittering with the gorgeous moonlight that managed to clear a way through the leftover rain clouds. Feeling her neck and throat flush hotly from his insistent regard, Lark strained to move her fingers. To squeeze the paddles. To finish him right here and now.
If only he wouldn’t look at her like that, with just the hint of a curve to his mouth to reveal fang and a decidedly wry smirk. Only one other man had possessed such a devastating smirk. It had been enough to cloud her eyes from his dangerous profession and fall blindly into his charms. To give up her plans to become a professional musician touring with a symphony. To believe that they could do the family thing and make it work. To hope that they could simply exist for one another.
Never again would charm seduce her. Not to the same end she’d had to bring her husband. It hadn’t been right, she being forced to such a thing. And it was all because of creatures like Domingos.
“Ah!” She thrust herself away from the vampire and, turning, sat, clasping the stake to her chest. Todd’s charming smile was right there, so close she could touch it, feel it, remember the way it had made her heart go pitter-patter. Until his smile had been lost, stolen by torture.
She was right there now, in the middle of the kitchen, kneeling on the tiled floor next to Todd. He’d been left at the doorstep an hour earlier. The man she had worried over for a year and a day writhed in agony on the floor, his clothing in tatters upon his emaciated form. Wounds on his forehead, arms and legs angered Lark. He’d been lashed. Over and over.
But those weren’t the most troubling wounds. Two puncture marks on his neck told her what the pain would not allow him to put into words.
Until he did speak—and then it was to beg.
“He begged me to kill him,” she gasped out.
“Your husband?” Domingos guessed. He hadn’t moved, and looked out across the rooftops that featured jagged spines silhouetted against the sky. “Why would he beg for such a thing?”
“Because they’d bitten him,” she said tightly. “He was going to transform into a vampire. The blood hunger was too strong to fight. To become a creature who feeds upon human blood was the last thing he could bear. So he begged me for hours to stake him, to end his agony.”
Todd’s moans had wended through her veins, cringing into her bones, until she’d crouched against the wall and had covered her ears with her hands. She hadn’t been able to look at him, and so he’d crawled up to her and slapped the titanium stake into her hand.
“Did you?” Domingos asked softly. “Stake him?”
Lark bent her head against her knees and squeezed her arms about her legs, not willing to voice the obvious reply. Tears did not come, because she’d cried more than a lifetime’s worth over the year and a day that her husband had been in captivity. Yet her body shuddered, racked by the pain that could not manifest.
She didn’t deserve forgiveness. Rook and the Order certainly hadn’t given it to her. She didn’t need it, didn’t want it. She’d done what had to be done. The cruel act had become her cross to bear, and she understood that.
But that didn’t mean it didn’t torture her as much as she believed her husband had been tortured. All as a means to prove to the Order that they, the vampires, would not stand for the Order’s brand of vigilante justice.
But if the Order did not police the vampires, then who would? The Council? The little Lark knew about that organization of paranormals who oversaw the paranormal realms was that they watched, and rarely intervened. They would never act against one of their own simply because he’d slain a mortal to feed his blood lust.
Lark felt a hand on her arm. Or maybe Domingos brushed the end of her ponytail. The vampire’s touch didn’t land on her for long, just testing, making the briefest yet cruelest contact.
The longtooth bastards had never touched Todd so gently.
She fl
ipped her hair over a shoulder and pounded the slate tiles with a fist. Through gritted teeth, she growled, “Would you get the hell away from me?”
“You don’t own the roof. I can sit where I want to.” Domingos leaned back on his elbows, stretching out his legs and crossing one ankle over the other. He wiggled his toes. The Order clothing fit him well, and— She wasn’t going to admire him. “Do I bring all this bad stuff up from inside your tender little soul?”
“Tender?” She scoffed. “It has nothing to do with you, vampire.”
“You’re lying.”
“You think yourself far more important than others do, obviously.”
“I am the least important thing to walk this world. Insignificant.”
“Save me the self-pity. We all have our crosses.”
“And yours is dragging through my path to salvation.”
“Poetic.”
“Just making an observation.” He rapped the tiles smartly. “I don’t like to see you sad.”
“You don’t even know me.”
“You are my death,” he said softly.
His words fluttered over her skin like something fragile, too delicate to hold without breaking further.
“Yeah?” Lark dismissed the ridiculous image. “If I’m your death, you don’t look too worried. I can take you out, vampire. I’m just a little...off...tonight. I’m tired. I’ve only slept a few hours.”
“Then we should reconvene tomorrow night. Same roof? Same stake?”
Lark smiled wearily, then tucked her head against her elbow, looking over her arm at him. His crazy smile wasn’t so much insane as charming, and charming promised nothing good for her.
“I can’t figure you out,” she said. “I can see the madness. But I also see a soul behind your fucked-up eyes.”
“I bet you’ve never looked into the eyes of your victims before you stake them, eh?”
“It’s not very smart. Track ’em and take ’em out. That’s the way of it. Live to serve. Serve until death. Die fighting.”
“Is that the Order’s motto? Special. You gotta love an organization that has its own kick-ass yet self-sacrificing motto.”