My appearance lacked sophistication? It was four in the morning! My free hand clenched into a fist, and I swallowed the urge to stab him with the big ass knife buried under my clothes. “You humiliated and used me. You come here with veiled threats and expect me to what? Throw my arms around you and thank you for letting me ‘keep’ my lover? And then you order me to take my place as your betrothed? Don’t you think maybe asking the girl if she wants to marry you is a better place to start?”
I kept my voice pitched low and controlled. I didn’t want to wake the neighbors, but more than that, I wanted to control my emotions. I tend to cry when I’m angry, and I knew he would take tears as a concession of his assessment of the situation.
“Let me make this clear for you. I will never willingly be at your side in your court. And if Daniel is in trouble, I can get him out. I don’t need you or your super powers or whatever it is you think you have. Get the hell away from my home before I turn on the full force of the Hunger and suck you dry.”
He leaned toward me until his nose nearly touched mine. In a move too fast for me to track, he wrapped one hand around my throat. Not squeezing, but the strength and tension in his fingers kept me still. My entire body froze. My heart skipped a beat before resuming function at top speed. “We both know you cannot control your power well enough to direct an attack at anyone. You shouldn’t make threats you cannot back up.” His eyes narrowed, and the promise of violence simmered in his gaze. “I am older and much more powerful than you realize, you rotten child. Do not push me too far. I will have what I want. I need you to get it. You will come to my court of your own will or you will come of mine. I suggest you come of your own. I can be very unpleasant when I choose. One more day. That’s all I’m giving you. Your consent has never been needed.”
He reached out and ran one finger down my jaw. I jerked away, but he followed. Sparking energy followed the path of his finger, hurting and at the same time bringing my nipples to stiff peaks. Adrian leaned in and kissed my lips, staring into my eyes the entire time.
His were dark and full of silent challenge, daring me to pull away first. When I didn’t he slid his tongue into my mouth. I bit down on it hard, but it only served to encourage him. He applied soft pressure to my neck, and I closed the gap between our torsos. He swept the inside of my mouth with his tongue once more and bit my lip in return. The pain and pleasure of it blended together. My pussy swelled in anticipation. I gasped and retreated, shoving against his chest, terrified of the sensations swamping me.
“I don’t want you either, but I need you. I’ve waited long enough.” Adrian smashed his mouth on mine, cutting my chin with his fang when I wrenched my head back and thumped it into the door.
I brought a hand to the cut and blood smeared my fingertips. “Don’t touch me.”
He released my throat and licked his thumb in a slow sensual swipe. The bastard had taken blood from my chin, and I hadn’t seen him move or felt the brush of his skin on mine.
I fished my door keys from my pocket with trembling hands. The deadbolt snicked free, and I stepped across the threshold before turning back to him. He stepped forward and then stopped, looking at the edges of the door frame with a puzzled expression.
Relief flooded me. I dropped my laundry bag to the floor behind me. “Oops, did someone forget to tell you about my protection spell? Bye-bye now.” I waved and shut the door in his face before backing up until my thighs hit the couch.
“You have until tomorrow night at midnight. After that I will use other measures. And, Miranda, you can deny the connection we have to everyone else, but you cannot hide it from me. I know what you crave, what makes you burn.”
I craved some T.T.B. action, not being the meat-puppet-sex-buddy of this creep. And I knew how I was going to get what I wanted. All I needed were some skinny jeans, ass-kicking boots, and a set of keys.
Chapter Nine
Fog rolled across the street in front of me, concealing patches of dark buildings, alleys, and weak streetlights. Cold, dirty cobblestones rasped the soles of my feet. The lamps resembled something I’d seen once in the historic district of Savannah, Georgia. Why did I keep conjuring up this nutty place when I slept? My nose started to run, the oversize T-shirt doing little to help insulate my body. I rubbed my biceps briskly and swept the area with my gaze.
No voices calling my name. Instead of being reassuring, I found the change in routine unsettling. I stood in one spot until I damn near froze.
Please, let this all go away. I wanna wake up, right now. Like, four minutes ago.
Crap. Nothing happening.
I set off for the nearest corner and stood in a cone of light cast by the lamp. Standing in the light not only made me more visible to anyone or anything that might come poking around, but I couldn’t see past it. The bright, welcoming beam of yellow ruined the little night vision I had. There might be unfriendly stuff out there. I moved over the edge into darkness and stood still while my eyes adjusted.
The numbness in my toes and fingers and the sharp sting of stones beneath my feet combined to make me think this was no ordinary dream. My breath huffed out and turned to steam before disappearing. I tucked my hands in my armpits to try to warm them.
The last time I had dreamed of this place, I’d woken up with sore, bruised feet from running down the streets chased by a disembodied voice. If I was hurt here, really hurt, would I wake up that way? And if I did, did that mean this was some real place, not a dream place or vision place, but a physical one somewhere on Earth?
Crap. Freddy Krueger could be out there right now waiting to eviscerate me with his razor-sharp-phallic-symbols.
The weight of the air choked and smothered me. It was like trying to take a deep breath through a straw. The streets and houses twisted in on themselves, all sharp angles and shadow. The night held sentience; it breathed, it watched, it waited. The windows in the dark buildings glared at me, and the stones beneath my feet sucked something from my skin. I tried to conjure up some warmer clothes like I’d done in the vision with Macha, but nothing happened, increasing my assumption that this place existed outside dreams or visions.
I did my best impression of Jason Bourne and sneaked across the street to the wall of a squat building that reminded me of an old-time general store. I leaned against the wall, resisting the urge to hug it simply because it was there and solid in this dark, empty place. When I peeked into the windows, a pale white face appeared on the other side and sneered at me, showing rows and rows of short, pointy teeth.
“Shit!”
Male or female? I didn’t know, didn’t care. Pearlescent skin, eyes without pupils, and a snake-like neck seared their way into my brain. It tracked me as I backed down the sidewalk to the left. A purple-blue tongue slid wetly up the inside of the glass opposite of where my hands had rested. Abnormally long fingers clenched and scraped claws down the surface. The muscles in my thighs twitched, the desire to turn tail and run flooding my system, but no way I’d turn my back until I absolutely had to. I spared quick glances over my shoulder until I made my way back to the circle of light on the corner.
I spun on my heel and ran down the street, barely registering the slap-sting of my feet hitting the stones, sucking wind in labored wheezes and pants. A cramp gripped my side and clenched, hard enough to take me down to one knee. I clutched at my rib cage, gasping, and swore to start working out.
Daniel had promised to train me to fight. I’d lift weights and jog all over the damned neighborhood until my sweaty stink scared every vamp within a mile radius.
A scraping scuttle on the road behind me let me know that the scary thing followed. At least I thought it was the same one. It lowered its head to the pavement and sniffed. The long serpentine neck undulated from side to side. It licked the ground. My god, the appendage had to be a foot long and covered with some kind of sticky mucous that gleamed in the faint glow from the intermittent streetlights.
The creature seemed humanoid, but the limbs were al
l wrong—too long and splayed to each side like a crab’s. It lowered its torso to the ground and rubbed one cheek against the cobbles, emitting a high-pitched mewling. I clamped my hands over my ears, the pain reverberating through my head. A scream exploded from my mouth even though I had pressed my lips together as tight as I could.
The white thing popped up on all fours like there were springs in its feet and hands and began sniffing louder, scuttling around the ground, searching for something. When it stopped, the head snapped up, and it faced my direction. I stood in a pool of darkness between the road and sidewalk, but honing in on my location wouldn’t take long if it tracked by scent.
I set off down the street as fast as I could without slapping my feet on the stones. The creature maintained a pace that allowed it to lower its head and smell the ground periodically. That didn’t mean it couldn’t move faster or it wouldn’t catch me. In zombie movies—not the new ones where the zombies are superfast and smart, but the old ones like Night of the Living Dead—zombies didn’t need to be fast to get you. They never tired, never stopped until they were reduced to bits and exploded brain matter.
The monster didn’t have to catch me right away. All it had to do was wear me down.
I absurdly wished for a flamethrower or even a machete for God’s sake, but nothing happened. If this was a vision, I’d be holding a flamethrower. And it would be daytime. And I wouldn’t be running down a creepy street with some sort of slug-colored, humanoid monster after me.
Even the voice that had called to me last time would have been welcome. Anything to give me a direction besides straight ahead with no end in sight, buildings that all looked the same, and cuts on my feet wearing me down with cold and pain. Eventually numbness would set in, but until then, I limped along wondering when my toes would blacken from frostbite.
I scanned the darkness on either side of the road, hoping to see something that resembled a weapon or sanctuary. Nothing held promise.
My stomach and leg muscles screamed with fatigue when I saw a figure ahead, standing on the corner beneath a street lamp. For anyone to stand that nonchalantly in this place made me think foe, but if they could get the slug creature away from me, I’d consider approaching anyway. I didn’t want those terrible teeth in my flesh or that tongue sliding across me, tasting me.
That was what it wanted, needed—to eat. It was driven by hunger that beat on my back with a steady pulse of magic and need. The closer I got, the more the figure appeared to be a man in a trench coat with the lapels turned up, concealing his face. The scrabbling on the pavement quickened, and I did my best to speed up, but my legs were like Jell-O and my rib cage burned. I wouldn’t be able to continue much longer.
A final desperate burst of speed brought me through the edge of the light and slamming into the man who stood there. He caught me by my upper arms and steadied me. The sound of the creature’s nails clacking across the pavement halted, and an angry howl split the night.
He turned his back to the creature while I stared at his face, saying nothing. It was a face I knew well. Parts of it stared back at me in the mirror each day. Straight brows above hazel eyes that bled more green than brown, high cheekbones, and a widow’s peak hairline dominated his features. Still impossibly handsome, and he looked no older than I, although I had always thought he was hundreds, if not thousands of years old. Three angry red welts ran down the right side of his face and into his lip. What could have injured him so grievously he had not healed?
“Still running from yourself, I see.”
I frowned at the comment. He never made sense to me. “Were you the one calling to me the last time I was here? Where are we anyway?”
“Yes, I called to you. Where we are is up for interpretation. It is Earth, but it is not.” My father looked over my shoulder and frowned.
I tugged my arms from his hands and huffed. “Can’t you ever answer a question normally? Does it always have to be some kind of puzzle that keeps me up for days trying to understand the double meaning? When I was a child it was fun. Not so much now. Then, I thought you were mysterious. Now, it’s just irritating.”
“I don’t know how else to explain it.” He relaxed his arms and schooled his face into the impassive mask I remembered. Thirty seconds together and we fell into old habits. Considering how little I’d interacted with him growing up, we shouldn’t even have them, but they were there. Family bonding time at its finest.
“Well, why are we here? How did I get here? How did you get here?” I wanted to pace, but craved the physical protection he and the light offered.
He shrugged and looked at me. Great, more games.
“Did you bring me here? To this nightmare to freeze my ass off and get a nasty reminder of how much I need to hit the gym?”
Something filled his eyes at the accusation before he leaned over me, his face nearly touching mine. I took a step back and didn’t care if it meant I ceded ground. I had pushed him past some point. My pulse rate jumped. Suddenly the dark beyond this little island of light looked pretty good.
His cheekbones sharpened and his lips thinned and parted to reveal his fangs pressing into the lower one. The scratches on his face began to ooze, and I stared, transfixed by the sight of blood welling up. I hadn’t thought he could be injured. Everything I’d ever been told about vamps intimated they could heal wounds, especially small ones rather easily. Hell, I could heal them. What had gotten a hold of him? Did he have other injuries on his body I couldn’t see?
“I realize you are too young to understand my motives, child. But let me reassure you, everything I did was for your protection and not without detriment to our coven.” His accent rolled out thick, almost obscuring the words. I had never heard him speak this way. The influence of France softened his consonants and rolled them into the vowels. Usually he had no accent at all. “You have run wild for too long. And now I am here, in this place of forgetting. There were those who advised me against the foolish freedoms I permitted you, who begged me to bring you to live with the coven as a child so that you would be indoctrinated to our ways. I did not listen, and now I have to pay the price.”
He heaved a sigh and clutched his left side. He had never spoken to me in such a way. Our brief, formal visits imparted an impression of invincibility and strength. Now that veneer was stripped away to reveal an injured, tired, damned irritated being. Injured or not, he could crush me with an absentminded slap to the head. I made sure to stay out of striking range.
I flirted with the idea of an apology but discarded it. He was right in many ways, but wrong too, and I refused to give up any more ground.
The skin on the back of his hand was cool to the touch. “Why did you call me here?” A labored breath streamed from his lungs, and he wrapped his jacket tight to his frame. “Father?”
“It wasn’t intentional. You are weak, unfinished.” He gripped my forearm and squeezed it until I shirked away in pain. “You’re going to get yourself killed.”
I wasn’t weak. A good bunch of this mess was his fault—not mine.
“Do you remember the night you told me I had to fuck one of your coven in front of everyone? Do you have any idea what that did to me? How much it scared and embarrassed me? How did you expect me to react? I was eighteen years old! Raised as essentially a human!” I slapped him hard in the shoulder in frustration. “What exactly was I supposed to do with the information? Run down the hall and pick the cutest vampire I could find and shag him right then and there? I’d never even been kissed, and you told me I was going to be the main attraction at some kind of orgy! Why did you let me kill that boy? Why didn’t you stop me? To punish me?” A sob left my lips, and angry tears flowed over my cheeks in hot lines.
His eyes flared with anger, and he straightened to his full height. “We couldn’t have stopped you. Your gift is the most powerful I have ever seen. I would not risk my people for one human boy. I offered you a great honor. A celebration of your Blooding. It was to be a time of great celebration and
return of hope to our people, but you—”
I crushed the lapels of his coat in my hands. “I was not raised as a vampire! I didn’t know what the Blooding was! Now I’m being stalked by some asshole who claims he’s my king… I sure as hell don’t want to be anyone’s broodmare. Maybe all you fucks should just go and die already!” My voice rose and rose as I shouted until it broke, cracking around the words.
He stepped closer to me until I had to crane my neck back to see his face. I’d never realized how tall my father was. “You are and always have been a vampire. A half-formed one that is going to have to adapt or die. You little fool, have you rejected your king? Do you know what has happened at my court? I betrothed you to him to protect you. I had you raised as a human so you could blend in better with the rest of the world.” He grabbed me by the arms again and shook me until my teeth rattled. “Find a Guardian if you insist on rejecting your king. They can guide you through the ceremony and find someone to act as the consort. Or you will die. It is the only way to gain control of your Hunger. If you do not harness your magic it will destroy you.”
His hands dropped from my arms, and he turned his back on me. “I handled things badly with you. I am sorry. I just wanted you to grow up surrounded by things a child should have. A Chosen Childe’s path is never easy. It is almost always the tale of a warrior. I wanted you to have something to hold onto when you were alone in the dark.”
The admission made something in my heart soften, but he left before I could speak past the lump in my throat. My father glided away, his footsteps silent even in his dress shoes. I wondered when he’d started wearing them and how he’d managed to transport them here, to this…place. I paced a slow circle in my beam of light, wondering what to do. I was sure my friend Slug-o was out there somewhere.
Hunger Embraced (The Hunger Series) Page 11