“Actually,” he returned, “it’s genetics, Doctor, or natural selection, if you prefer. Vârcolac are attractive because they have to be in order to survive.” The muscles in his thighs clenched tight as he watched her lean forward to pluck an olive off the toothpick with her teeth. “We’re a breed of human who has to take in blood for sustenance. So Mother Nature was generous enough to give our species the kinds of faces and forms that would make it easy to seduce a host into surrendering a vein.”
She stopped chewing her olive and swallowed. “Dr. Jess said Vârcolac either feed on a bonded mate or a donor, neither of whom needs a whole lot of seducing.”
Well, bowl him over with a feather, she knew something about their breed now. He’d have given her a solid month before she would’ve opened her mind to that kind of information. “It wasn’t always that way. The first Vârcolac could take blood for nourishment without forming a permanent bond, which allowed them to pursue multiple sources. You can pick up on that old way of being if you pay attention around here: Pure-bred’s have a predatory edge to them because they used to hunt, whereas the Mixed-blood Dragons, who came later, are the charmers.”
“Ah ….” She sat back, and her lips twitched. “And which one are you?”
He took a hard swig of his beer, an irrational anger gusting over him. The sparkle in her eyes and the teasing tone of her voice were bad enough, like some kind of damned flirtation, but her comment was also a complete face-shove into exactly why he could never have her. Or any woman.
“Actually,” he sneered, “I’m a genetic mutation, Doctor, if you really want to know, not entirely Vârcolac, not quite human, but a creature in every sense of the word.” He leaned toward her, jutting his jaw aggressively. “I’m a beast who hovers all of about two inches away from the edge of pure evil and the last thing you should be sitting your pretty little hinie across from.” He eased back, exhaling through tight lips. “You know, for someone who’s probably real smart about most things in life, you have your head particularly far up your ass about staying away from me. See my eyes, lady? They’re pure black. Don’t you think that ought to tell you something?”
She bit another olive off her toothpick and chewed…chewed and chewed and stared at him with such casual indifference that he wanted to grab her by the shoulders and shake her until her head tumbled off her neck. What did it take to get rid of this woman?
“Are you trying to scare me, Jacken? Because if you are, you’re going to have to come up with something better than that.” She lifted a shoulder. “So you’re a freak. So what? You’re the one who has his head up his ass if you think you’ve got the market cornered on that.” She polished off her drink, then tossed the toothpick into her empty martini glass with a sharp tink. “I feel like just as much of a freak as you do, pal, so you can take your holier-than-thou attitude and stuff it.” Snatching up her purse, Toni came abruptly to her feet. “But, hey, you want me to keep my hinie away from you? No problem. Consider me gone.”
“Yo, what’s up?” Nyko drew up at the table, as nonchalant as if it was an everyday occurrence to find Jacken chitchatting with a woman.
“Your brother’s a psychotic piece of bird crap, that’s what.”
“Oh, well ….” Bobbing his head, Nyko slid his hands into his pockets.
Toni waved at Thomal just as the blond warrior turned from the bar with a drink in each hand, martini in one, draft beer in the other, and headed back to him.
Nyko stood in place for a second, then scooted into the booth, quietly taking a sip of his beer.
Jacken just sat there, his whole body humming as if any minute it would shatter into a thousand pieces. He cleared his throat. “Where’s Shon?”
“Back in his room at the mansion. I told him we’d watch a DVD with him. He said any flick but one of yours.” Nyko moved his beer bottle around in its wet ring. “You okay?”
“Sure. Why not.” Lungs tight, Jacken stared a hole straight through the top of the table. He was so screwed up. Now that he’d finally managed to get rid of Toni, he only wanted her to come back. He pressed his eyes closed as a round of boisterous laughter rang out from over by the pool table. Don’t look.
But he did.
The humming inside him instantly shut off, replaced by a prickly tension that made him feel like his whole body was wrapped in barbed wire. Over by the pool table, Toni was holding Thomal by the hand and pulling him toward the back door, her beautiful eyes sparkling at him now. Jacken clenched his jaw so hard, the muscles in his face throbbed. Whatever low words Toni was saying to Thomal had the man nearly stomping a boot mark on his tongue.
Jacken slugged back the rest of his beer as the two blondes disappeared out the back door. It was only by the narrowest margin of control that he didn’t throw back his head and howl until the roof caved in.
It wouldn’t take long for a horny little shit like Thomal to crowd Toni back up against Garwald’s outside wall and start kissing a path up her throat, tasting the softness of her flesh, succumbing to the sweet insanity of her scent. His fangs would unsheathe from the force of his desire, and from there, it’d only take a few whispered words to convince Toni to moan, yes. Next would come the sweet puncture of a vein, then the wash of her blood into Thomal’s mouth and down his throat, the intoxicating liquid entering his body like living and breathing warmth, charging up every atom in his body with strength and energy, turning him into a man – a complete one, at last.
Then Thomal would take her, pushing inside her body to feel her wet heat close around him, savoring the hot, aroused cadence of her breathing in his ears and the sting of her fingernails at his back. He’d fill her womb with his seed, marvel at her belly growing with his child, cuddle up on a couch with her after dinner to watch The African Queen. Or not watch it, as they once again found themselves unable to keep their hands off each other.
But most of all, Thomal’s exalted status as Toni’s bonded mate would give him the right to ask her the name of her father so that he could hunt down the bastard and go Postal on his ass.
Lurching back in his booth, Jacken exhaled a raw, cursing breath. He looked across the expanse of table at Nyko. “Fuck it,” he said quietly. “I’m not okay.”
“Yeah, I know,” Nyko said simply.
“What …?” The word got stuck halfway up his throat and he had to start again. “What am I going to do?”
Nyko shook his head. “Don’t worry about it, Jacken. It’ll get better once she’s mated. Her scent won’t be all over the place, making you crazy.”
Yeah …. But no. It was way more than just her scent. She had him tied up in knots, smart-mouthed, pain-in-the-ass her, and seeing her get hooked up with another guy would just do a whole lot of making it worse. He propped his elbows on the table and grabbed his temples between his hands. He really needed to stop this train wreck before he fell completely in love with –
His thoughts jerked to a halt as his gaze fell on the two Ibuprofen Toni had given him, still on the table. His heart wrenched so hard that his eyes actually burned. “I need to get the hell out of here, Nyko. Let’s head back to the –”
Thomal stumbled up to their table, his face red and sweat-misted, a hand clutching his belly low down. “Toni just kneed me in the balls,” he gasped out, “and ran off.”
Jacken leapt to his feet. “Damn it, what kind of pantywaist are you, Costache?”
“She really distracted me, okay.”
Jacken held up a hand to stop any more of that shit from coming out of Thomal’s mouth. “Just find her,” he snapped. He turned and jogged for the door, his stomach twisting into a hard knot of worry. If Toni somehow made it to The Outer Edge and became another Gwyn Billaud, he’d never forgive himself for driving her away.
Chapter Eighteen
Toni darted in and out of the buildings along Main Street, keeping close to the shadows as she headed for the fork at the end of the road. The left fork. Breathing heavily, she shot into the low tunnel, the walls closing
in around her. Dark, dank, slime climbing the walls, water drip-dripping steadily down slick rock. A prickle of unease touched her nape. Had she actually wanted the town of Ţărână to appear freakier in order to fit better into her definition of what a “vampire” lair should look like? Well, be careful what you wish for.
Here was a cave, and one that ranked about a million on the creep-o-meter.
She loped along for about three hundred yards, then came to a gasping halt at the end of the tunnel. Just like in the right fork, the cave opened into a large cavern of buildings, although this part of the town was like … Jesus! It looked like The Projects times a Third World Country times … she didn’t know what – a scene out of Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the Thirteenth, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or any one of the choicer slasher films her brother had dragged her to see all those years ago.
Low, misshapen buildings were jammed cheek-to-jowl next to one another in the center of a u-shaped cut out of rock. Some were boarded up and many were dark. A few showed signs of life in the form of a bulb sputtering in a window, the dim light casting eerie, writhing shadows across the cave floor and up the lumpy walls. A pit of burping mud off to the left added a fitting sulfuric odor to the scene, though the worst smell was the out-and-out human stink.
Hardly an Ozzie and Harriet neighborhood like the right fork. More like Amityville, New York.
The surreal wail of a guitar cried out, and a shiver skittered up her spine. How bad did she want to turn around and run back to Garwald’s Pub? Bad.
Crap. She hissed a breath as the distant sounds of shouting skipped down the tunnel. Thomal had obviously recovered enough to announce her escape. She craned her neck, spying over the tops of the buildings to her right the opening of another cave tunnel. This entrance was caged off by about a twenty-foot stretch of steel bars, just like the ones surrounding Roth’s mansion. Worth investigating, for sure. She forced herself back into a run, heading right, and careened around the rundown building closest to –
She slammed to a halt and quickly ducked back against the building. Damn it! There was a crowd of men by the bars, about five on this side, the same number on the other side where the tunnel opening was. The group of them looked like they were gathered at a Hell’s Angels mixer, what with all of the torn black clothing, piercings, tattoos, chains and steel accent pieces.
Arc Costache was in the middle of the mess, on Ţărână’s side, of course, dressed in his warrior blacks and strapped to the gills with the usual dozen or so knives. “I’ve had enough of this shit,” he was saying in an annoyed tone. “Now break it up. If you assholes start flashing your blades around again, somebody’s going to get cut.”
Both sides of men lit off over that, complaining and jeering in what sounded remarkably like playground nana-nana-boo-boo speak.
“Nilan,” Arc barked at a man on his side, “get your friends back into the bar. Tollar,” he snapped at the leader on the other side, “line up nuts-to-butts and march right back into –” He broke off and pressed two fingers to his earpiece. “Yeah, I copy. What’s up?” Brows down, Arc listened intently to whoever was speaking to him. “Roger that, I’ll start looking for her.”
Oh, wonderful. Toni clenched her teeth together. Damn it, again.
“Dev,” Arc continued into the microphone of his headset, “come down off the wall and give me some backup. I’ve still got some hairballs down here with their panties in a bunch.” –”
Toni darted into the building she was hiding against and shut the door quietly behind her, suddenly finding herself enveloped in the kind of atmospheric gloom typical of a bar. A neon sign on the wall flickered the name of the joint, The Shank Tooth, while the rest of the lighting was done in a red, ethereal motif that had her blinking her eyes to adjust them. When they did adjust … wow, Twilight Zone, anyone? The creep-o-meter had just been pegged.
Granted, she didn’t tend to frequent places that catered to the underbelly of human society. So maybe it was standard to find small groups of people dressed in Alice Cooper garb huddled around tables like edgy nonconformists, mouthing their drinks and murmuring incoherently while a hermaphroditic musician made artistic love to a guitar on stage. Right. To someone used to this scene, it was probably perfectly normal, if a bit felonious, and didn’t feel at all like the type of bar where Freddy Krueger might hang out with Leatherface, Michael Myers, and Jason, in keeping with the whole slasher symbolism.
Now how bad did she want to rush back to Garwald’s? She closed her eyes and gave herself a mental shake. She really had to stop thinking like that.
Stealing over to the far end of the bar, she caught the bartender’s attention. The grubby man came striding over, but barely got to within three feet of her when his eyebrows nearly jumped off his forehead.
“Holy snakes,” he gasped, “you’re a human.” He closed the final gap between them, sucking air through his nostrils so hard his chin jerked back. “And unmated,” he added in outright horror. “Who the farks brought you here?”
“Some friends,” she quickly lied. “May I please use your phone?”
He made a face. “What ass-brain would bring an acquisition to The Outer Edge?”
“It’s a local call,” she continued in a rush. Heads were starting to turn her way, nostrils quivering. “A 619 area code, I swear.”
The bartender looked at her as if she’d just asked him who he thought would win the next Olympic Figure Skating pairs competition. “You can’t reach topside by phone, dummy, don’t you know that? Only with the Internet.”
She fought for calm, her nerves stretching to the breaking point. Someone exhaled sharply up near the stage. The guitar hit an off-key note. “Do you have a computer I can use, then?”
“Get!” he shooed her as if she was a cat. “You don’t belong here, missy.”
No kidding. Compared to the rest of the patrons, she was a schoolmarm from The Waltons. “Please, I’ll pay you anything you –”
The door slammed open.
The guitar twanged into silence and faces began to turn, one by one, to squint at the open door.
Toni exhaled a sigh that vibrated her lips. She herself didn’t need to turn around to know who’d just entered the bar.
“Yeah, I’ve got her,” Jacken said from the doorway, presumably talking into a headset. Footsteps approached, then stopped at her side. “All right, Toni, let’s go.”
She turned her head to give him an icy stare. “No.”
Jacken released a tight-sounding breath, as if his ribcage had shrunk around his lungs. The noise was loaded with impatience and frustration. Poor man, was his kidnap victim being difficult? “It’s not safe here.” He paused. “I’ll toss you over my shoulder if I have –”
“Don’t you dare,” she seethed, her eyes catching fire. “You touched me in Roth’s office the day you took the letter opener from me.” She held up a rigid index finger in front of his face. “That was your one freebie. There won’t be another.”
He planted his hands on his belt, his gaze dipping over her. She could see in his eyes that he was assessing her, probably remembering how easily it’d been to overpower her in Roth’s office.
The helplessness she’d felt that day flooded over her again, swamping her body, the remembered fear like a knife turning in her. Her soul screamed the unfairness of her situation. She stepped up to Jacken, teeth gritted, and rammed a forefinger into his hard chest. “I might not be able to throw a knife as well as you, pal.” Well, a letter opener. “But I do know how to perform some pretty inventive acts on a man’s testicles. And I don’t mean just kneeing them. Believe me when I –”
“I do believe you,” he cut her off, his lips tight.
“Good.” She stepped back. “Because I’m. Not. Going. Anywhere.” Right outside this bar was a tunnel that probably led someplace very important. She turned back to the bartender, who looked like he’d swallowed a bug. “May I have a Manhattan, please?”
“Cancel that order,” Jacken
overrode her. “Dr. Parthen won’t be staying.”
The bartender moved to the other end of the bar. Who could blame him, but Toni still felt sided against. She pressed taut fists to the top of the bar. Not since she was seven years old had the urge to throw a temper tantrum been so strong.
“Listen…” Jacken smoothed a horizontal hand through the hair. “We can do this easily if –”
“You’re a bully, Jacken, you know that?”
His face reddened, much to the fascination of their audience.
“And, gee, I’m sorry if I’m not making things easy for you.” Her breathing sped up. Frustration, anger, and powerlessness collided, churned, rose up and pushed tears to her eyes. “Damn it.” She bowed her head and pressed her thumb and forefinger to her eyelids.
“Shit,” Jacken muttered. “Toni … I don’t have to take you back to your room, okay. We can go anywhere you want. I know … what it’s like to feel trapped, and –”
“Oh, that’s rich!” She bolted her head up, her lips trembling. “You don’t know anything!” What the hell did Jacken want from her, anyway? For her to soul-share with him again just so he could push her away like he’d done five days ago? Ten minutes ago! “Aren’t you the one who told me to get my hinie away from you? Well, follow your own advice and leave me alone!”
She jerked away from him.
“You’re in danger here. Please…” He matched her step for step, an emotion she didn’t recognize swimming into his eyes. Desperation?
She braced her hands on his muscular chest and shoved, which produced no movement from him whatsoever. “Damn you! I’m so sick of you Masters of the Universe men!” She snatched up an empty beer bottle and swung it at his jaw.
He tilted his head out of the way.
Heat pressed outward against her cheeks. That’d been laughably easy for him to dodge. Growling, she hurled the bottle at him, then ran outside.
Dev was now by the tunnel, dealing with the gathered hoodlums, Arc off somewhere.
The Community Series, Books 1-3 Page 14