“What are you doing…oh!” Zoe breathed as Diego bit into her wrist. She could feel him tearing the skin back. It didn’t hurt because all she could feel was overwhelming lust. She wanted to fuck him…anyone…someone. Her body screamed for physical release.
Distantly, she felt Diego tugging on her wrist.
“Drink,” he said and pressed something against her lips.
She refocused. It was Declan’s wrist he was holding, while the other vampire was pushing her wrist toward Declan. She could see blood dripping from her wrist. Declan’s, though, showed an open wound, with only darkness beyond.
“I don’t know how this works, yet it must,” Diego said. “Put your mouth on it and draw whatever you can into your mouth. Then you must swallow it.”
She tried. Declan’s flesh was still not-hot, not-cold. She put her lips over the small break in his skin and sucked. Her eyes widened. There was nothing in her mouth. She could feel that. Yet at the same time, there was something there. She swallowed, even though there was nothing to swallow. She felt it move back into her throat and pass downward.
Diego was watching her closely.
“There was something,” she said.
“Now Cole,” he said. “You’ll have to guide him. He must drink from both of you, before he fades.”
Her arousal was diminishing. Pain in her wrist helped her focus.
Declan was drawing her blood into his mouth.
The red-haired vampire was biting into Cole’s wrist. “Sorry,” he murmured to Cole. He brought the bleeding wrist up to Declan. “Cole, too,” he said.
Declan nodded.
“Give your wrist to Cole,” Diego told her. “Make him drink.”
She dropped down lower, so that she was right next to Cole’s head. His panting had dropped to shallow breaths and he was watching her with pain-filled eyes. Zoe touched his cheek, hiding her own despair. “You must drink this. Just a sip, Cole. Then we can take care of you.”
He tried to speak. The only sound that emerged was a formless one of pain.
Zoe blinked back her tears furiously and pressed her wrist against his lips. “Drink,” she whispered. “Two little sips and this will all be over. Even the pain.”
His lips moved weakly against hers.
“I don’t think he has the strength,” she whispered, fear blossoming in her.
“I can fix that, temporarily. Make it fast when he rouses,” the red-haired man said. He picked Cole up and tilted his head to one side, then bit down into his neck.
Cole’s eyes widened and he moaned. It wasn’t a sound of pain, but of a man deep in the throes of passion.
“Quickly,” Diego directed her.
Startled, Zoe pressed her wrist up against Cole’s mouth once more. She felt him drawing in her blood, in a deep sip. “And swallow,” she reminded him.
His throat worked.
“Declan,” Diego said, with a snap in his voice.
Declan put his wrist against Cole’s mouth. “Drink, Cole,” he breathed.
Zoe could see his throat moving as he swallowed whatever essence it was that they had drawn from Declan’s spirit.
“Now you,” Diego said, bringing Cole’s dripping wrist toward her. “Last one, then it’s my turn.”
“Your turn?”
“He’s being euphemistic,” the other vampire said. “Quickly. There’s not much time.”
The urgency in his voice was unmistakable. Zoe sucked, drawing Cole’s blood. She swallowed quickly.
“It’s done?” she asked. “The bond is sealed?”
Howling broke out all around them, along with more inhuman sounds. It seemed as though every dark creature among the trees gave throat to a scream of protest.
Diego grinned. “What do you think?”
“Jump! Jump!” Seaveth cried. “Before they attack again. Take as many as you can!”
“Take the body!” Declan shouted, leaping to his feet. He hurried over to the prone Grimoré and tugged on the feet. “We must take it.”
Around them, the air shivered as many, many more people appeared among the trees and all around them. They wore cloaks, the hoods up. One landed almost right next to Zoe. She saw big eyes, that reminded her of Lindal and Sera.
The man put his arms around her and she felt him strain upwards. The trees and the thick night air vanished and were replaced by a large room with concrete walls and floor and nothing else in it.
There were dozens of the hooded men in the room, each with an arm around one of the people who had been in the forest with them.
Even Cole was in the arms of one of them and now, in this normal, bright light, she could see the great wound that had torn up his torso, almost all the way up to the top of his chest.
Diego grabbed the arm of the one carrying Cole. “This way. Quickly. Hurry up.” He pulled the cloaked man out of the room.
The rest of the cloaked men were vanishing, jumping away again. Zoe turned to look at the one that had brought her here. He was already gone.
“That’s elves for you,” Seaveth said with a smile. “Silent efficiency.”
“Where are they taking Cole?” Zoe demanded.
Declan appeared next to her and looked around. “Woah!” He put his hand out, as if he was trying to balance.
Seaveth looked at him curiously.
“So, there is a limitation to where I can go, after all,” he told her.
“You’re in New York. It’s not a very tight limit,” Seaveth said.
“Zoe is here. So is Cole. That’s my limit,” he said. “As soon as you all disappeared, I was pulled back to the house. Then I could feel Zoe, pulling me here….” He looked around. “Where is Cole?”
Seaveth gave them both a warm smile. “You won’t be able to see him for a while. He will be fine, though.”
Zoe pressed her lips together. My turn next, Diego had said.
“He just won’t be human any more, will he?” she said.
Seaveth’s smile faded. “No. Cole’s time as a human is at an end.”
Declan sighed. “We saved the trinity?”
“We did,” she agreed. “I don’t know if this will give you any comfort at all. It seems the force that arranges the trinities, that anticipated the coming of the Grimoré, also predicted this would happen, too. There is always at least one vampire in every trinity and I thought yours was the anomaly. I didn’t know how you would seal the bond…yet it seems you have ended up exactly where you should be.”
She waved toward the doors at the end of the room. “Come. We have food, fresh clothing and showers. It’s time to meet the other trinities.”
Chapter Eleven
Zack’s kiss on her cheek caught Beth mid-yawn, disrupting it completely. “Bed time, sleepyhead,” he said, picking up her hand. “You’ve righted the world, saved the trinities and reunited the lovers. The war will still be here when you wake up tomorrow.”
“There’s something bothering you, isn’t there?” Lindal asked. He was standing at the window, watching wet snow slide down the glass and melt.
Beth sighed. It had been a busy night. They had introduced Zoe and Declan to everyone, while Diego had whipped Cole away to an isolated place where he could ease him through the transition to vampire. Zoe had looked pale while they explained to her what they were doing, but as she had been surrounded by vampires at the time and had been in the business once herself, she didn’t raise the sort of objections a human coming in cold might have done.
Declan had merely shrugged. “Cole and Zoe can handle me being what I am. I’m the last one to scream about Cole not being human anymore.”
Wyatt and Alexander had pulled Beth over to a spare table in the dining room not long after that. Wyatt had a map of North America that he spread out on the table in front of her. “I took some time off hunting the bastards and did some hard thinking instead,” Wyatt said and glanced up at Alex, who smiled and rested his hand on Wyatt’s shoulder.
Wyatt leaned over the map. “I talke
d to the shifter…Gilbert, the bear soul from the north that Diego brought in.”
Beth nodded.
“He’s very old. Older than he looks,” Wyatt added. “He’s got a lot of memories. But it’s the recent stuff he recalls that was interesting.” He spread his hand over the map. “I think the Grimoré are only in North America.”
“That’s something we’ve suspected for a while,” Beth said. “None of the hunters in other countries have reported anything suspicious and after all these years they know what to look for.” She was in endless communication with the worried groups in Europe and Asia and in the south, too.
“I think there’s a reason they haven’t spread too far,” Wyatt said. He tapped the map again. “I talked to Sera and Lindal tonight, too. They told me some interesting things about the bridge between the elven world and ours. Did you know that if you can’t teleport the way elves can do, when you come across the bridge, you land in the same place on Earth every single time?”
“Where?” Alex asked curiously.
“Southern France,” Wyatt said.
“Lucky. It could have been in the middle of the Pacific,” Alex murmured.
“Anyway, as everyone using that bridge can teleport, they can emerge from the bridge and jump to wherever they want, so it doesn’t make a lick of difference to the elves.”
“But the Grimoré can’t teleport,” Beth breathed.
Wyatt pointed to her. “Right.” He tapped the map again. “I used an old hunter thing. I tracked sightings and reports, every single incident, and put them on the map.” He took his hand away. “The lighter colors are older sightings. Darker are more recent. Can you see the pattern?”
Beth studied the map. She put her fingers over New York. “It started right here.”
Wyatt nodded. “I think the Grimoré bridge to Earth is somewhere in New York state.”
Alex blew out his breath. “Hell’s bells, if we could shut down the gate…”
Beth frowned, staring down at the map. “They went north and south and west…they scattered. Look, they’re everywhere.”
“That was something that Gilbert pointed out to me,” Wyatt said. He put both hands around the big cloud of crosses and check marks, right at the top of the map. “The sightings stop here, south of the Arctic circle. Then they start moving south again. That’s why Gilbert was pushing south. He was running ahead of them.” Wyatt sat back. “It’s October. Winter is coming in,” he added.
Beth sat back, too. “They don’t like the cold.”
“No, they don’t like it at all,” Wyatt agreed, smiling. “So now we know why they’ve moving and where they’re heading.”
“South,” Beth said, feeling a surge of deep satisfaction.
That had been the last big revelation in a night filled with them. Beth looked at Zack and Lindal now, feeling the edge of excitement touch her again, despite her tiredness.
“I keep thinking about how precisely this whatever-it-is seems to have anticipated everything that happens,” she told them. “Gilbert’s wisdom. Wyatt’s map. A possible location for the bridge the Grimoré are using to get here. Cole’s death. That he would be turned and would become the vampire of the trinity. That Declan would refuse to fight and we would find our doctor in him.”
Lindal nodded. “Are you going to let him autopsy the Grimoré we found?”
“There’s no harm that can come from it,” Beth said, “and we might just learn something useful. So yes, I will, once we’ve all recovered and put tonight far behind us. I know no one said anything, yet Cole’s death impacted every trinity. I could see it in their faces.”
“I felt it, too,” Zack murmured. “If we had not sealed the trinity first, if we hadn’t been able to turn him, we would have been permanently weakened. It was like having a prop pulled out from under us. We were, for a little while there, all balancing on one leg.”
“Instead, we now have a healer for the Elves—that’s Sera—and a doctor for the humans.” Lindal leaned his shoulder against the window and tried to look superior. “It seems fitting the vampires are left to fend for themselves.”
Zack snorted. “You mean, we aren’t vulnerable like you and humans,” he said shortly.
Lindal just raised his brow. “If you want to comfort yourself with that, go ahead.”
Zack rolled his eyes and looked at Beth. “I see you still don’t have a name for the whatever-it-is.”
“I do. I just feel silly saying it aloud,” Beth admitted.
They both looked at her.
She sighed again. They would pull it out of her if she didn’t ‘fess up now. “I keep thinking about how it’s all encompassing, this thing that arranges the trinities and knew the Grimoré were coming in the first place. It’s never tried to communicate with us, yet it’s using us just the same. It seems to be all over the world. So maybe it is the world, battling to preserve itself and everyone on it, any way it can, against the Grimoré invasion.”
“The world?” Zack said, sounding amused.
Lindal shook his head. “No, our world is the same. It has an intelligence, one that arranges things when it needs to. We don’t understand it, yet we know it is there. Earth could be the same, stirred from slumber by a threat only it knows how to deal with.”
“Earth…” Zack said flatly, still sounding skeptical.
“Gaia?” Lindal suggested.
“Or Terra,” Beth added. “Whatever her name, she’s on our side and she knows what she is doing.”
* * * * *
When Zoe opened the door, Brady pushed his hands deep into his pockets. Awkwardness was coming off him in waves. “Zoe,” he said carefully.
“Hi, Brady. Come in.” She stepped aside.
He moved into the house and looked around. “You said to come over at seven,” he said.
“That’s right. Relax, Brady. We’re not going to eat you. Cole is in the living room. Come through.” She led the way.
Cole got to his feet as they came in. He didn’t smile at Brady. “I’m glad you came,” he said sincerely.
“You look great,” Brady said. “Better than that. Zoe said you had been ill.”
“I’ve been off-color for a few weeks,” Cole said. “This week, for the first time, I feel normal again. Almost,” he added, with a little quirk of his mouth.
Zoe smothered her smile. The last few weeks had been stress-filled, as Cole had learned to deal with his new vampire nature and the overwhelming urges and needs that came with it. Zoe’s human presence had not helped. It was Declan’s undead yet semi-corporeal presence that had the most calming effect on Cole and the two of them had spent most of the last few weeks locked up, talking things through and sometimes physically hashing out Cole’s urges.
Slowly, Cole had been able to spend more and more time in Zoe’s company without wanting to eat her. The bonding had been mostly responsible for his fast adaptation to vampire life. The bonding…and his drive to be with them both.
“I can’t stand not having you both with me,” he had declared. “I just got to have the two of you, now I can’t…I’m going crazy.”
None of that hard fought-for victory showed in Cole’s face as he looked at Brady now. “Have a seat,” he told him.
Brady stayed on his feet. He rubbed the back of his neck. “I have to confess…I don’t remember everything that happened last time I was here. I remember some of it, though and that’s enough to make me want to puke.”
“You did puke,” Cole said mildly. “All over the antique Persian rug upstairs.”
Brady’s face turned bright red. “I sorta remember…” He sighed. “Send me the cleaning bill.”
“Already have,” Cole replied. “What do you remember?”
“I remember…did I take a shot at you? I mean, did I actually fire a gun?”
Cole didn’t answer. Neither did Zoe.
Brady let his head roll back. “Shit on a stick,” he said, with a heavy sigh.
“Sit down, Brady. Sit,” Col
e said firmly. “Let’s deal with this once and for all.”
“I don’t know that I can sit, all civilized like that,” Brady said honestly. “I feel like a jackass.”
“You are a jackass,” Declan said from the doorway.
Zoe held her breath.
Brady spun to look at him, almost wheezing in surprise. His face, still red from his embarrassment, drained of color, turning a sickly gray around the edges. “Declan,” he croaked.
Cole moved. Zoe had never seen him move so fast before yet she had seen other vampires moving at top speed, so she wasn’t alarmed when she couldn’t see him properly. He picked Brady up and dumped him in the armchair. “Told you to sit,” he said shortly and went back to his chair.
Brady gulped air, his fist against his chest. He couldn’t take his eyes off Declan. “You’re alive.”
Declan jumped, reappearing in front of Declan’s chair. “Nope,” he said softly.
Declan gasped again, his eyes bugging. “Oh dear god,” he breathed. “I remember stuff from that day. None of it made sense and I figured I was so drunk I remembered it wrong. Strange stuff….” He sounded on the verge of panic.
“Shh… It’s okay,” Declan said soothingly. He picked up Brady’s hand and held it. “Everything’s going to be fine.”
Brady looked at his hand, where Declan held it. “How can you do that? Aren’t you…a…?”
“Ghost? Because of Cole and Zoe and some other things, I’m more than a ghost, now.”
Brady’s eyes suddenly filled with tears. “Declan,” he said hoarsely. “It’s so good to see you.”
Declan patted his cheek. “I’d say the same about you, big brother, only you’ve been fucking around with my friends.” He moved over to the sofa, where Cole and Zoe sat and sank onto the cushions between them. He picked up Zoe’s hand. “I want you to stop contesting my will.”
Brady swallowed. “This house belongs to the family. Your family.”
“Cole and Zoe are my family. My extended family is much bigger than that. You, Brady, Carol and Jess and our cousins and uncles and aunts…you can be part of that, or not. It’s going to be up to you.”
Zoe's Blockade (Destiny's Trinities Book 5) Page 10