Series Firsts Box Set

by Laken Cane

  But now, those urges were rising up and taking over, and if I were being honest with myself, I liked it. I liked it a lot.

  I was healing. There’d been times when I wasn’t sure I ever would.

  I clutched the steering wheel, closed my eyes, and conjured an image of Amias Sato’s face. I found the cold lump of familiar, waiting hatred, and I watched it begin to warm, to send rising tendrils of rage into my mind, my heart.

  Deliberately and methodically, I forced the rage to soften. It would always be there. I’d always hate Amias Sato. But it would not take me over. It would not own me.

  Not anymore.

  I started the car and drove to Angus’s house to prepare for the night of hunting ahead, and when the excitement came, I welcomed it. I was a bloodthirsty hunter filled with not only cold death, but hot desire.

  I could live with that.

  Part Three

  Chapter Thirty

  Shane and I crept through the woods unchallenged, and I began to think Clayton’s prediction about the vampires leaving me alone was going to happen a lot sooner than he’d thought.

  “Anything yet?” Shane asked.

  I lifted my nose to the air. “No.”

  There was an awkwardness between us that hadn’t been there before we’d had sex. He remained quiet and slightly grumpy as always, though, so probably it wasn’t on his mind the way it was on mine. It loomed in the background, the sex, and the possibility that it could happen again.

  Oh, that possibility.

  I’d tossed the box of condoms into my nightstand, but not before taking a couple of them out and slipping them into my pocket. I didn’t want a baby or an STD. Not that supernaturals could carry human diseases, but there was Shane, who was human and apparently very fuckable, and what did I really know about him?

  So I slipped a couple of condoms into my pocket along with the holy water and an extra silver crucifix.

  It was smart to be prepared.

  I cleared my throat. “What I told Miriam—”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “She’s persuasive,” I said.

  “You’re weak.”

  “I’m not weak,” I snapped. “I told her because I wanted to tell her.”

  He lifted an eyebrow. “Why?”

  “I don’t know.” God, why did I always have to sound like a dimwit around him?

  He glanced at me. “She’ll devour you if you let her. She has a warped need and not just with the golem.”

  “She wants to devour you,” I told him.

  He grunted, which told me nothing.

  “Is there a—”

  “Trinity,” he interrupted. “Less talking, more hunting.”

  I fell into silence, then realized he might have been right to rebuke me when I gave the air a quick, searching sniff and pulled in the faint perfume of Gordon Gray’s scent.

  “Got you,” I whispered.

  But then, there was something else.

  Shane turned, bringing up Betty the Shotgun, and I immediately pulled Silverlight. She glowed, but her light was dim, as though the vampires weren’t quite close enough to excite her.

  Still, I could feel a change in the air. Something was stalking us. “The demon,” I realized, suddenly terrified. I’d rather have been devoured by the necromancer than the incubus.

  I stood back to back with Shane and searched the shadows of the woods with a narrowed gaze, watching for detaching shadows and listening for the furtive rustle of feet across dry undergrowth.

  My heart pounded, my stomach tossed, and I felt slightly dizzy with the onrush of adrenaline. I needed to run, to fight, to do something.

  But we waited, silent in the heaviness.

  “Do you feel him?” I whispered, finally.

  “Quiet,” he hissed.

  He was weak, the demon, so it wasn’t like he could rush out and suck the life from us. Still…

  The click of my dry throat was loud when I swallowed, and I forced myself to take in a deep breath and release it slowly, calming myself before I became a blubbering mess.

  The vampires and the fight got me eager and excited. The dark unseen, the unknown threat, and the foam-throwing demon scared the absolute crap out of me.

  But then, something that very well might have been worse than the demon strode out of the darkness.

  Miriam and Clayton.

  “What the actual fuck,” Shane yelled, lowering his shotgun.

  Silverlight brightened, just barely, and I watched stunned—but a little relieved—as the necromancer walked toward us.

  When she got close enough for me to see her eyes, I understood a sad fact. She didn’t want to just bang Shane Copas. She loved him.

  That was why she’d called in the hunter. Not to help me, to teach or guide me, but because she wanted him near her.

  “No one tells me I can’t hunt.” Her voice was cold, but her stare was so fierce and hot I wondered how Shane’s face didn’t burst into flame.

  Clayton stood just behind her, guarding her back, and he only shook his head when I looked at him. He hadn’t wanted to come. He’d had no choice.

  Shane was raging. He grabbed her arm and shook her, hard, then shoved her away from him. “Get the fuck out of here,” he said. Then he turned on Clayton, his voice full of contempt. “Get her out of here, bitch.”

  Clayton didn’t react at all to Shane calling him a bitch—but one day, Clayton was going to explode, and the unlucky person in his path would die.

  Miriam got in Shane’s face—not literally since she was shorter than him by about a foot—but she stepped up to him and poked him in the chest, her face tight with anger. “I will not stay at home like a good little girl,” she told him. “I’m more than capable of killing vampires.” She pointed at Clayton. “So is he. Your reluctance is just a little fucking strange, Shane. Just a little fucking strange.”

  “You are not a hunter,” he told her, through clenched teeth. “You cannot kill vampires. You can only get in my way and fuck up everything by making me have to take care of you. Go home, Miriam.”

  Her face paled further, but she stood her ground. “I’m going to help you.”

  He threw his head back and yelled his frustration to the dark sky and the watching moon.

  I took her hand. “We can’t protect you, Miriam. In the heat of battle, we can’t protect anyone. We can only kill, and you will die.”

  She looked up at me, but there was no anger in her eyes. Only despair. “I want to be included,” she said, confused. Like a child.

  And it broke my heart.

  Shane had no such tender feelings. He slung his shotgun over his shoulder and glared down at her. “You raise the dead—you don’t hunt. You’re a burden I don’t want to—”

  “Shut your mouth,” I told him, and my voice was as calm and cold as it had ever been.

  He jerked his head around to look at me, but he shut his mouth.

  Miriam squeezed my fingers. “Thank you, darling, but he’s right. I wasn’t thinking.” She let go of my hand and turned to Clayton. “Take me home. We’re not needed here.”

  But even as they turned away, the incubus, with a dozen vampires at his back, charged into the clearing.

  Silverlight attached with an enthusiasm that hurt my arm—the pain traveled over my shoulder, through my chest, and down my spine, but there was no time to think about it.

  Even though Shane hadn’t felt him, I had. I’d known the demon was near. I had to start listening to my gut. Perhaps if I had, I wouldn’t have let my guard down with the arrival of Miriam and Clayton.

  The demon led the posse of undead like a nightmare scene from a fictitious horrorscape. And just that quickly, Miriam and Clayton went from being unwelcome liabilities to powerful, supernatural allies—despite what Shane and I thought.

  Our only allies in the woods that night.

  Seemingly from thin air, Miriam produced two wicked looking switchblades, and holding one in each hand, she ran to meet the
vampires—and the demon.

  “Miriam,” Shane roared, and raced after her, firing his shotgun just before he reached her. The crowd of vampires scattered—some died, some kept coming, and I knew they were infecteds before I could properly see them.

  From the other side of her, Clayton, his pistol in his right hand, stake in the left, coolly picked off one vampire at a time. He’d said he was no longer a hunter, so I’d have to give them the true death later, but that was okay. Shot up with silver—I assumed—they’d stay down and out of the way for a good long while.

  The infecteds fought and died behind the silver wall of my supernatural friends, but the incubus shot past them, and he came for me.

  After all, there was nothing tastier than a bloodhunter.

  Silverlight shook with eagerness and nearly took off my arm when the demon threw himself at me. He was well past the point of caution, and I could see in the rot and cracks in his face that his condition was critical.

  And he was not thinking straight.

  I drove my blade through his shoulder and he screamed, and all the sounds of hell were in that scream.

  “I need to go home,” he cried, and I was so stunned I hesitated.

  But Silverlight didn’t. She drove herself through his ribs even as he bore me to the ground, his mouth open, his eyes like tortured bits of glass, trying desperately to latch on to my essence so he could feed.

  Even through his weakness, his cracking façade, and his desperation, I felt his sexual pull. He had to use the foam to make it irresistible, but it was there.

  I turned my face to the side and thrust my blade in more deeply, twisting it as I pushed. I heard bones grind and crack, and I kicked my way out from under him, realizing only then that the supernaturals and the hunter stood around us, none of them knowing what to do with the demon so close to me.

  I didn’t need them.

  At least I thought I didn’t. I thought I had the situation under control.

  I grinned. “No demon is getting into my pants.”

  But then the incubus, as though drawing on everything he had, did something none of us expected. He didn’t use sex to feed.

  He grabbed my head, slammed his mouth against mine, and latched on. And then, he began to suck, and I began to die.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  When his mouth created the seal around mine and he drew that first breath from me, Silverlight went dark.

  It was as though she died—and only later would I understand it was a defense to save herself. While she was attached to me, she was me, and he would have stolen her power and her life had she not fallen away.

  Still, for one second, while I could still think, I felt alone.

  But then, as the demon grew stronger, the thing that made him an incubus came to life. Just that suddenly, his allure was so strong that my terror began to dim beneath my desire. I wanted him. I wanted him more than I’d ever wanted anything or anyone in my entire life.

  That feeling, that ecstasy, it was indescribable.

  And I clutched him to me, moaning into his mouth. His tongue slid against mine, and it was enough to make me climax. Just the slide of his tongue.

  My entire body climaxed.

  Then everything was chaos.

  The others attacked—I could distantly hear them there, trying to kill the demon, to get him off me, but with the incubus’s second inhalation, I was floating in a sea of bliss.

  The demon grew in power as I grew weaker.

  Seconds, that’s all. Just a couple of brief seconds, and then Miriam put her switchblades through the demon’s head. He paused in his sucking kiss, but not even silver in a demon’s brain would kill him, and not even the hunter and the golem hacking him to pieces would drag him from his long-awaited feast.

  And I didn’t want it to.

  But then, Amias Sato came.

  The master came.

  The vampire who’d once tried to kill me would now try to save me.

  I couldn’t kill Amias, but Shane could have. Still, he understood the master was trying to save my life, and not even Shane Copas was going to interfere with that.

  And Amias did something none of the others could do—he ripped the demon off me. I felt the disconnect, and it was agonizing, like my lips were being pulled from my face, my insides were being wrenched from my body, and I couldn’t breathe through so much pain.

  So much despair.

  Surely I would die from it.

  But finally the connection was severed completely, and I lay on the ground trying to remember how to breathe as the demon and the master fought.

  They rolled through the night, screaming and growling and bleeding, like two wild, rabid animals.

  And then there was only silence and the pungent, ripe scent of pain and blood.

  I lay on the ground and stared up at the starlit sky, bereft. Black depression had descended when the incubus left me, and I hadn’t the will to move.

  “Clayton,” Miriam said. “Get her off the ground!”

  Clayton lifted me into his arms and Miriam grabbed my hand, her eyes a little too wide. “Trinity,” she cried.

  I was alive, but I was swimming in black water, drowning it in, and I didn’t have the will to reassure her.

  Shane got in my face. “It will pass, Trinity.”

  And I clung to his gaze with a desperation that rivaled the demon’s nearly unbreakable connection to my mouth. And then even the desperation passed.

  “It will pass,” he repeated. And there was no doubt in his face. Only a calm certainty. “You won’t feel this way forever.”

  I didn’t believe him. There was no belief left inside me. It was as though the incubus had taken every drop of joy, hope, and love I’d possessed, and had left only darkness.

  Was that how the vampires felt? When they’d died, had they faced this gaping empty endlessness? Had they retained that memory, that knowledge? Was that why they feared death so violently and needed beyond anything else to kill me, the one who could toss them back into that nightmare?

  Was this their afterlife?

  It was. I knew it as well as they knew it.

  And I could not blame them for wanting to end the hunters.

  Amias had chased the incubus away, but the desperate demon would be back. He’d had a taste, but in order to regain full strength, he would need all of me. And now he was strong enough to take it.

  But what he wanted to do, what he needed to do, those were secret things that one should do in darkness.

  And in darkness he would wait. He would wait for the right moment because no longer was he quite as desperate. No longer would he have to take such risks to get a taste of healing power.

  I was too dejected to even shudder at the notion.

  Because worse than the fear that he would return was the fear that he wouldn’t.

  Miriam grabbed my face. “I don’t like that look in your eyes, Trinity. That’s not who you are.”

  “It’ll take a while to restore what the incubus took,” Clayton said. And maybe he didn’t mean to, but he tightened his arms protectively around me. “She’ll heal.”

  “I don’t like it,” Miriam spat. “She looks like you. Emotionless and unreachable. Fucking…I don’t like it.”

  “I’m not hurt,” I said, dully. “Put me down, Clayton. I have a vampire to track.”

  He hesitated, and only when Miriam turned her glare on him did he let me slide to the ground.

  I stood beside Shane, who looked at me with maybe the tiniest spark of admiration.

  “Trinity,” Miriam said.

  “Yes?”

  “Don’t come to see me until you’ve lost that shit. I can’t deal with it.”

  “You realize none of this matters,” I said. “Don’t you?”

  She frowned. “What doesn’t matter?”

  “Anything.” They didn’t understand, but I did. I got it. Nothing mattered. Nothing mattered because we were going to die.

  So why even bother to fig
ht? To live?

  Shane rested his shotgun on his shoulder. “There are two things that can drag you out of the darkness.”

  I didn’t ask what those two things were, but he told me anyway.

  “Blood,” he said. “Killing. Fighting.”

  “And sex.” I looked at him. “It’s always going to be sex.”

  He nodded. “But not with me. That wouldn’t bring you back. You need someone almost taboo. Someone who will make you feel something I can’t.”

  “Who?” Miriam took a step closer to us, putting herself between me and Clayton. Maybe that was an accident, maybe it wasn’t.

  Shane noticed, as well. “Don’t worry,” he told her. “Not even Clayton could pull her out of this. At least not as fast as she needs out.”

  “Then who?” Miriam tilted her head. “Who can drag her out of there? Because I’ll go get him.” For a second she perked up, and if I hadn’t been so wretched I’d have laughed. “Me?” she asked, taking another step toward us. “Is it me? Because I’m willing to take one for the team.”

  Shane stared down his nose at her. “Full of sex and nightmares,” he murmured. “Aren’t you, Miriam?”

  She shrugged. “Yeah. So? I do what makes me feel good.” She pointed her chin at me. “She could make me feel good.”

  “You’re not the one,” Shane said. He looked at me. “She knows who it is.”

  And suddenly, I did know.

  Even the thought of him made a sprout of something red and obsessive and violent burst through the crust of darkness.

  “I am the one,” someone said, and we all turned at the voice.

  Amias Sato slid from the shadows.

  He was covered with blood, and I wanted to add to it.

  “Oh,” Miriam breathed. “Angus will kill us all if we let that happen.”

  Revulsion rose inside me, turned to anger, morphed into rage, and God, how I welcomed that rage. It was bigger than the darkness. More consuming than the despair. I grabbed it with both hands. Then I ripped Silverlight from her sheath, and I leapt at the vampire.

  I thought I saw him smile before he turned and flew away, his long, silky hair flowing behind him like a teasing, enticing, irresistible song of seduction, and I could only follow with my sweet rage and my need and my desperation.