Bitter, Kel shook his head. He hadn’t drunk enough to fog the brain, fog his need. “You can’t. Nobody can.”
Her lips, hot and silken, traced along his cheekbone, brushed against his mouth. “Try me…”
He wanted to pull away from her. Wished he had the strength to do it, wished he wasn’t so damn weak, so tempted. Easing back, he stared into her eyes. They were a warm, wicked brown, full of life and seductive welcome. When he eased back, those pretty brown eyes went dark, her mouth turning down in a frown. Quick as a wink, though, she was smiling again.
Try me…
Abruptly, he reached out, cupped the back of her head in his hand and jerked her against him. She came to him eagerly, all but climbing up his body, unconcerned by the fact that there were easily two hundred people in the bar, and not one of them blind. Reaching out, Kel closed his hand around the bottle of Jack Daniels. With his arms full of woman and whiskey, he slid off the seat.
“To the back,” she whispered in his ear, but it wasn’t necessary. Kel could follow the scents of blood and sex easily. The back of the club was marked off from the main room by a plain door, guarded by a big black man with dreadlocks hanging halfway down his back. He opened the door for Kel and the girl without any of them saying anything and when Kel passed through, the door was closed behind him.
The music fell to a muted roar. She lifted up, gazed down at him. “End of the hall, there’s some stairs. I’ve got a room on the second floor.”
The largest part of him didn’t want to find some quiet room. He just wanted to fuck her here, in the hall, where anybody could see. Fuck. Feed. Walk away.
But for reasons he couldn’t explain, he searched out the stairs. Walked up them, staring into her face—pretty, not beautiful. Tinkerbell does Goth, he thought again, as her ruby red lips pressed up against his. She licked his lips and he opened for her, kissed her. Her taste was darker, more exotic than Kel had expected.
Not sweet. A rich wine. “There,” she whispered, pulling back a little and nodding to the left.
He didn’t look away from her as he entered the room—if he did, he might start to think and he couldn’t risk thinking. Once he finally decided to give in and feed, the hunger had risen out from its hiding place, a sleeping beast and he had to sate it.
Sate it now.
But the blood-hunger wasn’t the only thing demanding satisfaction. His cock throbbed, thick, hard and aching. He kicked the door shut behind them and leaned back against it, watching as she reached down, took the whiskey from him. Kel watched, mesmerized, as she dribbled the liquor along the tops of her breasts.
“Take what you want.” Reaching out, she threaded her fingers through his hair and tugged him closer. She tightened her knees around his hips, gripping him and steadying her weight as she slowly straightened so that his face was level with her breasts.
Kel licked the droplets of whiskey away. Each lick, each taste of her fanned the fires of his hunger and he got rougher, rougher—his fangs dropped and he raked one soft swell. As the taste of her blood filled his mouth, he swore and tore away.
“No!” She urged him back, whimpering, rocking against him. Blood welled against the ivory of her skin. Lost, Kel licked the drops away and then sealed his mouth over the wound. She healed quick, too quick—shifters, like vamps, always did—and when he lifted his head, his hunger screamed at him.
“Do it again,” she rasped.
And again…
And again…
Kel let himself get lost in her, lost in the dark, wild ride, feasting on her sexually, feasting on her blood. A shifter’s blood had a stronger kick than a mortal’s. It wasn’t something he’d had much of, but now he wondered why. So easy not to think past the high her blood gave him. So easy not to feel anything beyond the way her slender, delicate body moved against his, meeting strength for strength. So easy not to think about anything but how wild, ripe and exotic she was.
The hours grew late, ticking by without Kel even realizing. By the time he collapsed between her legs one final time, head buzzing and his body all but limp with satisfaction, it was past two in the morning.
She purred deep in her throat, sounding like a cat.
“What’s your name?” he asked abruptly. Almost instantly, he wished he hadn’t. He never wanted to know their names. Never wanted them to have a name—all he wanted was for them to be Angel. Just for a little while. Just long enough to take what he needed.
But it was too late to take it back and he couldn’t pretend she was Angel, anyway.
“Phoebe.” She hummed under her breath and slid her hands over his shoulders. “I know who you are. You’re one of the Hunters. Kel…right?”
Shit. Disgust started to pulse through him. A groupie? He’d run into them on occasion, female vamps or shifters who seemed to think that fucking a Hunter was pretty much the ultimate hobby. He hadn’t quite caught that off her.
Still…
Lifting his head from between her breasts, he saw that she was smiling. It was a sad, understanding smile.
“Relax,” she teased. “I’m not going to go cut a button off your jacket or anything.”
“I wasn’t wearing a jacket.”
Phoebe shrugged. “You know what I mean.” She reached up, traced his lips with her finger. “I knew you were a Hunter, yeah. But I don’t care. That wasn’t why I wanted to be with you.” Holding his gaze, she reached down, trailed her fingers over the curve of her breasts and murmured, “This is why.”
Looking down, Kel found himself staring at her breasts with something caught between horror and fascination. Dried blood streaked her soft curves. Blood he’d put on her as he nicked her silken flesh time and again.
“Son of a bitch,” he muttered, almost sick with disgust.
Phoebe placed a finger under his chin, guiding his gaze back to hers. “Don’t. I like the edge,” she said in a calm, level voice. “I knew you could take me there. And I knew you needed…something.”
Something. Yeah. He needed something. Shaken, he pushed away from her and stared down at his own body. As drained as he was, he wouldn’t heal as quick. Even with her potent blood pulsing inside him, it would take him a little longer. So the scrapes, scratches and bite marks on him hadn’t faded away into nothingness like hers had.
They’d left marks all over each other.
Yeah. He needed something. He needed his head examined. Phoebe, like she knew what he was thinking, laughed.
“Stop looking so tormented. We didn’t do anything that can’t heal. And…if you’ll let yourself admit it, what we did felt good. I bet that’s the most alive you felt in years.”
Good. Shit. Yeah. It had felt damn good. “That’s not the point,” he said, his voice gritty and rough. Rolling off her, he settled down on the edge of the bed and studied the room. Their clothes were tangled up in a line between here and the door. The room looked like something out of a war zone and he wasn’t entirely convinced it had looked like that before they got in there.
He was pretty sure just about every flat surface, horizontal and vertical, had been pressed against one of them at some time during the night. He’d taken her bent over the bathtub, pressed against the reinforced windows, sprawled facedown on the floor near the bed.
The bed itself was a disaster, the sheets twisted and stained with sweat, semen and blood.
“Not the point,” he muttered, dropping his face into his hands.
“No? What is the point?” She sat up, trailed her fingers over his shoulder. When he looked back at her, she smiled. “What’s the point? Both of us are miserable. I saw that on you even before I realized what you were. Neither of us are going to get to have what we want in life.”
Startled, he shoved up off the bed and grabbed his jeans. “What in the hell are you talking about?” he demanded.
A humorless smile curled her lips. “You know what I’m talking about.” She slid from the bed in a smooth, sinuous motion. She moved across the floor in a glide of
silken skin and sleek muscles, bending down to grab a T-shirt from the floor. She tugged it on, the hem falling down to cover her delicate curves.
Kel felt a little better as the simple white cotton hid those curves and the faint traces of blood, lingering reminders of what they’d done to each other. Reminders he really didn’t need. His gut was already a nasty mess, from guilt and from the overpowering urge to grab her, push her down to the floor and start it all over again.
Tearing his eyes from her body, he watched as she shoved a hand through her short, spiky hair. “Broken souls recognize each other, Kel. I look at you and I see a man with a huge, gaping hole inside him. Not many things leave that kind of hole. That kind of hole is caused by loss. Losing the one you love, losing your family.” She slid him a look over her shoulder. “Which one did you lose?”
He didn’t answer her. Not even when she approached him, staring into his eyes and she reached out touched the gold chain he never took off. Not for Hunting. Not for fighting. Not for anything. It was a simple rope chain and it had a gold ring on it. The diamond on it wasn’t much, although that wouldn’t have mattered to Angel. He’d bought it the weekend before it happened. It was why he’d been busting his ass working those extra hours, hours he could have spent with her.
The ring was a mocking reminder that it had all been for nothing and now he had the rest of his life to think about everything he’d missed.
Phoebe slipped a finger under the chain and lifted it, staring at the ring. “Who did you lose?” she asked again, her voice soft, but determined nonetheless.
Protectively, he reached out and took the ring away, closing his hand around it. His voice was rusty as he replied, “Everything. Everybody.” A hollow ache settled in his throat. “My mom died two years after…after this. I never got to tell her goodbye, couldn’t go to her funeral. But—”
He broke off, shaking his head.
Phoebe watched him with knowing eyes. “Losing your folks didn’t put that pain in your eyes.”
“No. It was a woman—the woman. Losing her is what…” He trailed off, unsure what to say. Yeah, he missed his dad, and wished a million times he could have had a chance to tell his mom goodbye, that he loved her.
His dad was alone now. It had been twelve years since he’d seen the kind, gentle man who had raised him, helped make him become the halfway decent guy he’d been before he’d been Changed. Kel had thought about going to see his dad… Not visit, but just to look at him without letting the old man know he was there. Visit his mother’s grave.
Just once. To say goodbye.
But their absence, missing his mother’s funeral, or knowing his dad was alone, none of that was responsible for killing something inside him. It was Angel.
“She’s the one who put that hole inside you,” Phoebe finished for him.
“Yeah.” And she was the reason he wouldn’t let himself go back home. There was no way he could look at her from a distance. If he was close enough to see her, he’d have to touch her, have to hold…have to make love to her.
Vampires couldn’t have sex without feeling the urge to feed and he wouldn’t do it. Wouldn’t risk it. Not with Angel. He wouldn’t damn another person to this life, least of all her. Since he couldn’t trust himself, he wouldn’t risk it.
A hole… Yeah. That pretty much summed it up. Kel had a huge, gaping hole in his useless heart, a place Angel had filled inside him.
“Hmmm. I get that.” Phoebe turned away and padded on silent feet across the room, kneeling down in a front of a dark wooden chest. The metal hinges squeaked as she opened it, gently, carefully easing the lid back. Something about the way she handled it told Kel it was important to her. She smoothed a hand along the front of it, touching it with reverence. Reaching inside, she said, “My parents have been gone a long time…a real long time.”
Glancing at him, she gave him a forced smile. “Really long. Probably longer than you’ve even been alive.”
Curling his lip, Kel said, “I ain’t been alive in more than ten years.”
Phoebe shook her head. “You’re alive, Kel. You’re just different now.” She lowered her gaze, staring back into the trunk.
Curious, he edged closer, but she shifted her body, shielding him from seeing inside. She pulled out one thing and eased the lid back down before she stood and turned around. Whatever she’d pulled out was pressed against her middle, shielded from him. “Not too many of us come into this life happily,” Phoebe said, her voice soft, faraway. “And most of us fight it. I know I did.”
“Do you hate it?” Kel rasped, his hands opening, closing, the impotent rage inside him fighting to break free.
“Now? Not as much as I did then. Now…now, I guess I just get by. But back when I was first Changed, yeah, I hated it.” Taking a deep breath, she looked down and stared at what she held in her arms. “If I wasn’t such a coward, I would have ended it a long time ago.”
It was a picture frame, Kel realized, even as his mind processed what she’d just said. Ended it. His brows dropped low over his eyes as he stared at her face. “You mean…”
Phoebe laughed, a sharp, cynical sound that sliced through the air like a knife. “You know damn well what I mean. Can you tell me you haven’t ever thought of it? Hard not to think about it, when you’ve lost everything. When you have nobody.”
Abruptly, Kel found himself remembering a night more than fifteen years earlier, when a sharp, harsh pain had jerked him out of his sleep. The night Angel’s dad had died, how he’d gone to her, held her until she cried herself to sleep. His dad emerging from the darkness to sit beside him as Angel slept in his arms.
She doesn’t have anybody now. He’d said those words to his dad on that long ago night, but he’d been wrong. She hadn’t been alone then. She’d had him. And his family.
Hopefully, she still had his dad. Kel sure as hell didn’t. In an unconscious echo of her words, he murmured, “Yeah, I get that.”
She sighed. In that moment, she looked so sad, so desolate. The thick black eyeliner smudged around her eyes, her tousled black hair, even the T-shirt hanging from her shoulders added to the air of lonely grief. “They’ve been gone from me now for more than fifty years. It still hurts.”
“Yeah. It does.” Fifty years? Kel reached out and gently tugged on the picture frame, unsure if she’d let him see it or not.
But she let go easily, averting her face as he studied the grainy black and white family portrait.
It was Phoebe in the portrait. She was easy enough to recognize even without the short, gamine haircut and the Goth-girl makeup. In the picture, she had one of those beehive-looking hairstyles and a dress that would have done June Cleaver proud. The man at her side wore a suit and tie, resting his hand on her shoulder and giving the cameraman a stiff smile.
And sitting on Phoebe’s lap was a little kid. A boy with his mother’s dark hair and his dad’s eyes. Kel’s already battered heart ached with sympathy. “Both of them.” He lifted his eyes to stare at her. Without realizing it, he reached up and closed his fist around the engagement ring he’d never been able to give to Angel.
Phoebe stood with her back to him, staring out a narrow window and swaying back and forth in a slow, unconscious manner. “Yes. Tommy wanted to take our son fishing. They’d left when he got home from work on Friday and they were going to camp out in a tent and spend all day Saturday on the lake. Saturday night came, and they never showed up. I got scared and worried. The lake where they’d gone fishing was a few miles away so I went to a friend’s across the street to see if somebody could drive me out there.” She broke off and when she spoke again, her voice was hoarse and thick with tears. “It was too late. Even if I’d gotten there earlier…”
“Werewolves.”
“Yes.” She nodded. “I was walking around, looking for Tom and Robbie, calling them. I heard this howl. Then a scream. They killed my friend, Tina. I heard her screaming and I ran, but by the time I got there, she was already dead. And then
they came for me.”
He’d always sucked at this part. Hell, as far as he was concerned, he sucked at all of it. But this was the worst, comforting the victims when he had nothing warm or comforting inside him to offer. And even though it had been a good fifty years, Phoebe was definitely still a victim. In a tight, rusty voice, he said, “You have to know there’s nothing you could have done to help them.”
“That doesn’t make it any easier.” She sighed, rubbed a hand across her chest as though it hurt.
Kel imagined it did. Broken hearts weren’t just about emotional pain, but physical. That was a lesson he’d learned in spades. “No.” His voice was hollow as he responded, “No, it doesn’t.” Looking back at the picture he held in his hands, he rubbed a finger across Phoebe’s image.
She looked happy.
In love.
Complete.
A whisper of sound drifted to him. Slowly, he lifted his gaze, watched as she turned around and stared at him. “I’ve been dead inside for longer than you’ve been alive,” she said softly. “Am I wrong?”
Kel shook his head. Even though he could argue that he wasn’t alive anymore, he didn’t see the point. She must have been born sometime in the 1940s. Hell, his parents hadn’t even been alive in the 40s. Shit, he’d just fucked a woman who technically was about the same age his grandparents would have been, if any of them had been alive.
Crossing over to him, she moved with a slow sinuous rhythm that called to mind the predator that lived under her skin. Eyes bright and half-wild, she said, “You look like you’re in the same place as me. Alive on the outside…but in your heart, you’re dead.” Gently, she took the picture frame from him and set it aside before reaching up and curling a hand around his neck, pulling him down with surprising strength. “I can’t feel guilt or shame over this, Kel. I won’t let you make me. This is the only time I feel alive. So I like a little pain. A little blood. At least I’m still capable of feeling something. And at least I never turned into the kind of monster that did this to me, to my family.”
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