Series Firsts Box Set

by Laken Cane

  And the demon liked sex.

  A lot.

  I lay naked and sprawled on the couch before both of them, and both of them slid their fingers into me and rubbed me and kissed me and ran their tongues over my breasts.

  But eventually, there was only Clayton. He was the only one I cared about, the only one I saw. Let the demon have his fun. As long as he couldn’t mess with my mind, I really didn’t care what he saw or what he did.

  To me, there was only Clayton.

  And when I climbed on top of Clayton and took him into my mouth, I wasn’t sucking the demon.

  Clayton lost control and grew rough and hard and almost mindless in his hunger, and that was okay. My passion was a match for his. My need was as big. My lust was as strong.

  Over and over and over, until finally, our bodies could do no more. In the end, we found ourselves on the floor, and we lay spent and replete and sticky and hot, and he kept his arms wrapped around me as though he would never let me go.

  But Angus was dying.

  Clayton’s arms tightened as he felt me stiffen and knew what was coming, knew our time was at an end, and he rose up over me to give me one last, long, tender kiss.

  When he pulled away and stared down at me, regretful but resigned, I saw something in his eyes that made me cry out in terror. I saw the absence of something.

  The demon was gone.

  Chapter Forty-One

  I sat in the middle of the filthy floor, stunned. “What have we done? Where did…how did he go?” I beat suddenly at my chest, unable to breathe, as I feared for a second that the incubus had climbed somehow into me.

  But no. He couldn’t have. I would have felt him. I would have known.

  “I don’t know.” Clayton began to get dressed, slowly, methodically. Passionlessly.

  “But how? Did he go home?” I looked up at him, half disbelieving, though I didn’t doubt he felt the demon’s absence. “He went home and Angus will die.”

  He reached down and plucked me from the floor, then wrapped his arms around me as I stood silent and horrified. He said nothing, because there was nothing to say.

  But then, he tightened his arms for one brief second, so tightly it hurt, and a dark force descended upon him. I felt it.

  It was the feeling of absolute darkness. Of bleakness. Of despair.

  And I remembered that feeling. I’d lived it.

  I put my hands to my mouth, as though the invisible incubus might take my breath. “He’s back! The demon is back?”

  Clayton’s face was blank, his voice emotionless. “Not that demon.”

  And I saw it in his eyes—eyes that no longer contained the spark they’d held a mere five minutes earlier.

  “No,” I whispered. “Oh, no, Clayton.”

  “We have a connection,” he said, blankly polite. “Miriam and I. She knew the moment the incubus was gone.”

  “And her hold is once again established,” I realized.

  I think he would have broken down right then if he could have. Instead, he set me aside and strode toward the door. Before he pulled it open, I thought I heard him sigh. “What you’ve given me will stay with me forever, Trinity. I will lose myself in those memories when life gets…” He shrugged, then turned to look at me. “Too difficult.”

  “Clayton.” My heart broke for him. Clayton was once again a slave to Miriam and her darkness, and Angus was dying. It was more than I could handle.

  “I could have tried to end my life while the incubus was inside me,” he said. “I didn’t. This is not your fault. Neither is Angus.”

  “Doesn’t matter if it’s my fault or not. It’s unbearable. All of it.”

  He gave me—and my bare body—one last, lingering look, then turned away once more. “She calls, and I must answer.”

  His pain from delaying was extreme.

  I wouldn’t have known except for the flinching around his eyes and the way he held his body, stiff and careful, as though he might shatter if he moved too quickly. Clayton could hide anything, even the agony of disobedience. Didn’t mean he didn’t feel it, though, and my heart broke a little more.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said.

  Miriam would be ecstatic.

  Then Clayton opened the door.

  And the world outside sprang to a nightmarish life.

  Infecteds flung themselves at us, shrieking their pain and rage and devastating hunger.

  Clayton slammed the door shut, then bent forward, his jaw clenched and sweat beading on his face. “Fuck,” he ground out.

  He couldn’t resist for long. The vampires would tear him to shreds, but his will did not belong to him. It belonged to Miriam, and she would force him to go to her, no matter what.

  I ran to the window, yanked down the dusty curtains, and stared with horror. I hadn’t even been aware night had fallen. And outside the cabin vampires had gathered, waiting.

  There weren’t a few vampires or even a few dozen. There appeared to be hundreds. Hundreds of mad, ravenous vampires.

  They surrounded the cabin. They surrounded us.

  Not even Silverlight could get us through a crowd like that. I ran to the backdoor, yanked it open, then managed to slam it shut a millisecond before vampires began throwing themselves against it.

  Vampires couldn’t enter a house without an invitation. But those were infecteds, and I really had no idea what they could or could not do.

  I wasn’t taking any chances.

  But even as I turned back to Clayton, I realized the futility of our situation. He huddled against the wall, his hands curled into fists, the cords of his neck standing in sharp relief.

  “I have to go. Trinity. I have to go.”

  Miriam had said he couldn’t die. If the vampires got hold of him, I was pretty sure they’d prove her wrong. Very, very wrong.

  I raced to my scattered clothes and dug my cell phone out of my jacket pocket. I put it on speaker, then hurried to get dressed as it rang.

  Miriam answered. “Trinity, where are you? We’ve been trying to call you.”

  “Miriam,” I yelled, yanking on my boots, “stop summoning Clayton. We’re surrounded by infecteds and if he leaves this cabin, he’s fucking dead.”

  “Where are you?”

  “We’re in the cabin in the woods.” I ran to Clayton. “Where we caught the incubus.”

  “You and Clayton,” she said, deadly calm. “You’re together.”

  Miriam was pissed.

  I wrapped my arms around Clayton, but that only seemed to make him worse. He groaned and shoved himself away from me, and as though his feet were trapped in tar, he struggled to reach the door.

  And he struggled not to reach the door.

  “Miriam,” I begged. “Please, stop.”

  “I can’t. It just is, Trinity, and I can’t turn it off.”

  “Then he’s dead,” I whispered.

  But she was already gone.

  I grabbed my cell and dropped it into my pocket, then took a deep breath and drew Silverlight from her sheath. There was nothing to do but help Clayton fight his way back to his mistress. I wasn’t letting him go out there alone.

  He reached the door with his gun in one hand and a blade in the other. “Stay inside,” he ordered, his voice thick with pain.

  “Not tonight, buddy.” I grabbed the doorknob and flung open the door. “Stay behind me. I’ll get you through or die trying.”

  My heart lifted, even with the bleakness of the situation. I was about to fight, to kill, and that excited me nearly as much as the forbidden fruit of Clayton’s beautiful body.

  I would fight and forget, and maybe I’d die, but I’d take half of those sick ugly bastards with me.

  Silverlight screamed to life in an explosion of light, and almost before she took my arm, she began killing.

  The infecteds screamed and fell beneath her fury, but there were so many of them, and I was distracted by Clayton. Good thing Silverlight didn’t need me to guide her. Good thing Amias had given
her to me.

  I had a feeling I wouldn’t have lasted long past my “activation” without her. I might hate Amias, but it was obvious that the life he’d once tried to take was now precious to him.

  And I was sure he had some very good reasons for that.

  Clayton and I were surrounded by a mass of reeking, hungry vampires—not just hungry, but full of the special rage the infection gave them—and they had little care for anything other than killing and eating us.

  The fact that I was a hunter—that I was a bloodhunter—had attracted them and was whipping them into a frenzy. And though normal vampires might want to kill me, not even they would risk getting infected just to get to me.

  Or so I believed, until I saw Amias cutting through the deranged infecteds like a deadly machine. He held no weapon, but his hands were weapons. His nails, his fists, his speed, and his strength were weapons.

  He couldn’t kill the infecteds, no more than Clayton could kill them, but when they lay on the ground and struggled to repair themselves, they were the same as dead to me.

  And then, I realized something shocking, something amazing, and something so logical that I knew it’d lingered on the edges of my mind, even though I hadn’t grasped it. Silverlight’s silver light was killing any vampire it touched.

  Her light was a weapon.

  That silver halo shone in a wide arc, and as I swung the blade, the light reached those the sword could not. And it killed them.

  They burst into flames, fell down, and disappeared.

  She was growing in power. With each battle, she grew. She became more.

  My Silverlight.

  And as I whirled and hacked and sliced, I lost sight of Clayton. I could only hope he would forge a path through the vampires and reach the only person who could stop his pain. Miriam. The very person who gave it to him.

  My entire body was tingling, bursting with energy, and I saw the deadly vampires through a haze of red as the air became stained with flying blood and acrid with the scent of burning flesh.

  I was worried about Clayton, but it was a sort of distant worry, because as I fought, my desire to kill overwhelmed all else. I was an animal.

  A feral, enraged, unthinking animal.

  Pretty much like the infecteds.

  And bloodlust was my world.

  The more I killed, the less human I became. I felt it. But I didn’t care. I cared only about the blood.

  Silverlight didn’t care, either.

  She killed in a blur of lethal silver light and razor-sharp edges. She took me over and together, we killed.

  I heard Clayton roar in agony, once, over the buzzing in my head. Pain lashed the walls of my mind, there and gone, as the vampires breached Silverlight’s defenses right before she killed them.

  Silverlight and I spun through the crowd, cutting and killing everything we touched, but still, we were not enough. There were too many infecteds. It was as though every sick vampire from every city and forest in North America had descended upon Red Valley.

  “What happened?” I screamed, as Amias ducked Silverlight’s wicked swipe and tore a vampire off my leg. He ripped the vampire’s head off then whirled to grab another.

  “Sickness,” he said. Or maybe he didn’t say it, at least not aloud, but the words echoed in my mind as though he’d murmured them into my ear.

  But whether he spoke or not, it was suddenly as though gongs of doom split the air. Those sounds were inside my mind, as well, but it was a portent I could not take time to ponder. Not then.

  I figured I was dead. I was injured, and though the dead lay around me in heaps, I was overwhelmed. Silverlight never lost her glow, but my energy was waning. I wasn’t a machine. She had control of my arm, but the rest of my body was sliding into exhaustion.

  And finally, I became slow, sluggish, and weak, and I knew I was going to die.

  That knowledge didn’t infuse me with a shot of adrenaline. It didn’t make me stronger. It just made me sad.

  Clayton was likely dead, Angus was dying, and I’d done all I could.

  Then, as I wobbled and nearly fell and a dozen vampires took advantage and lunged, spearing me with fangs and nails and hunger, I heard something so much better than slithery words and gongs of doom.

  I heard the familiar crack of a shotgun. Shane’s shotgun.

  My supernaturals had come.

  They’d come for me.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  I saw them then like angels from heaven, and that gave me the boost I needed. I still had fight inside me. I still had death inside me.

  Miriam had brought them—and as soon as I thought about her, I spotted her. She wasn’t wielding her switchblades, though. She stood in the bed of Shane’s truck, firing a shotgun into the crowd of vampires on the ground.

  I gave Silverlight her head and fought my way toward them.

  As I watched, Shane tossed Clayton a shotgun.

  He wasn’t dead.

  He was just back where he belonged.

  I raced toward them, where I belonged, cutting vampires down as I ran. Somehow, I thought everything would be okay if I could reach them.

  I just had to get there.

  They spotted me, and Clayton’s eyes widened right before Shane lifted his shotgun, clubbing vampires out of his way as he ran to meet me. When he reached my side he gave me a quick grin, and though that grin never reached his eyes, I felt my chest ease just a little.

  Back to back, we gave the infecteds a death they couldn’t return from.

  And in the end, an entire town of vampires lay dead at our feet, some of them disappearing in puffs of smoke, some of them waiting for true death. And Amias strode toward me, ignoring the guns aimed suddenly and steadily at his chest.

  Silverlight sparked once before she slept, and I slid her into her sheath without taking my stare from the advancing master.

  The supernaturals stood with me, silent, waiting.

  Amias had helped save my life once again, and there wasn’t one among us that didn’t believe his death would mean mine.

  Amias stopped, finally, and stood close enough for me to reach out and stake, had I wanted to. Close enough to touch.

  “What happened?” I asked him, as I’d asked him earlier.

  “We were infected,” he said.

  “Red Valley vampires?” Shane asked.

  Amias nodded but didn’t take his dark stare from mine. “I woke up tonight to this. Nearly all of them infected.” He gestured at the dead who lay in bloody mounds upon the ground. The ones Silverlight had killed had already disappeared, but the grim piles of empty and still smoking clothing that remained showed where they’d once been.

  There was something in his face, something so stark and despairing and grief-stricken that I wanted to cry for him.

  Then in the very next second, I wanted to punch him.

  “Had the woods not been heavy with the perfume of your sex and that magical scent new hunters possess,” he said, “the vampires would not have gathered here, and the humans would have suffered.”

  I wasn’t sure whether to blush or to pale, and I remained silent as I tried to ignore the looks the supernats were giving me.

  “That would have caused some turmoil,” Rhys said, matter-of-factly.

  “They didn’t appear to have much in the way of common sense,” Shane noted, then leaned over and drove a blade through the heart of a twitching vampire.

  Amias flinched but said nothing. He knew they had to die.

  “How did so many of them become infected?” I asked, crossing my bloody arms. “And how could they not have known? Wouldn’t they have been aware of being munched on by one of their own?”

  “It’s worse than that,” Amias said, tonelessly. “They were infected by feeding. Animals are now carriers. Humans are now carriers. If we eat, we become infected.” He lifted his stare to mine. “There will be few pure humans left.”

  “What will happen?” I asked, too tired to comprehend the hugeness of his
words.

  “We will starve,” he replied. “Or we will feed and get sick. We will be wiped out. It happened before, centuries ago.”

  “Natural occurrence that keeps the bloodsuckers from taking over,” Miriam said. “Exterminated by a disease. It’s a good thing.”

  Amias didn’t so much as glance at her. “Those of us who live will need to find pure humans from whom to feed.” He slid his glittering stare to mine. “I am lucky that I already found mine.”

  “You haven’t found anything.” I took a quick step back, as though he might suddenly grow hungry and sink his fangs into my neck. Or maybe I was afraid he’d hit me with his irresistible…lust power and I would throw myself at him.

  “I could eat for a month by licking the blood from your battered body,” he said.

  And it didn’t matter that I was injured and exhausted and had just spent two of the most intense hours of my life in Clayton’s arms.

  The master’s voice slid over my skin and stirred things deep inside me, and I shivered with a desire as delicious as smooth dark chocolate.

  I might despise him, but the man could make me hot by opening his mouth and caressing me with his words. And that was just wrong.

  I swallowed hard and looked away. “The vampires are going to die. All your food is contaminated.” I couldn’t help it. I started to laugh.

  “You’re hysterical.” Amias looked down his nose at the others. “Take her home. Give her a hot bath and something strong to drink.” He started to turn away, then hesitated. “She is mine. Someday, I will destroy anyone who touches her.”

  Shane narrowed his eyes and lifted his shotgun. “You don’t want to threaten us, vampire.”

  Amias wasn’t far from wrong—I was giddy. But I was stronger. A week ago the battle I’d just been involved in would have had me in the hospital.

  I touched Shane’s arm and was slightly ashamed of the pleasure I felt when the master slid his gaze from Shane’s face to my fingers.

  “Let’s kill the rest of them,” I said, “and then we need to talk. Angus is…”

  Miriam spoke for the first time since she’d arrived. “Angus is dying, just as the vampires are dying. Everyone is dying.”