The Strigoi Chronicles Box Set

by Nya

  Ergo, Dreu got shipped to His Holiness and the prelate’s insatiable taste for a boy blessed with a deep throat and nimble tongue.

  I hated, hated, hated slipping into third person, whiner extraordinaire, but some days I earned the right, some days not so much. At least, curled into a ball of misery, I kept my thoughts to myself while Fane bounded off into the wilderness and Jef took up guard duties at the edge of the clearing.

  A clearing that was rapidly filling with snow, in the one-to-two-inch an hour variety. Demon-me, bred for warmer climes, took exception to the challenge of facing down winter’s early blast.

  Feeling snippy, I glared at Jef and said, “You couldn’t take us back to Yalta, or someplace warmer?”

  “I told you, man, it doesn’t work that way.”

  Annoyed that the assassin wasn’t groveling, looking contrite or using my preferred form of address—Sire—I spit out, “Then enlighten me.”

  “You already know…” he paused to listen to snowflakes pinging off the branches, then continued, “…the basics. The portals.” He stared at me and resumed quietly scanning the forest. End of tutorial.

  I pressed him with, “So?” That got me a shrug in response.

  I did know, after a fashion, but the truth was I hadn’t paid much attention. Michel du Velours had made the passage between realms seamless, at least to my compromised senses. Saddle up a Ferrari or a GTO, buckle up, pedal-to-the-metal and presto-chango, we were wherever Pops wanted to be. And not once had I sullied his leather seats with my stomach’s contents from breakfast.

  There was disorientation, to be sure. Nobody drove balls-to-the-wall like my father the demon king from Hel. But the recovery was quick, leaving a little buzz that wasn’t unpleasant.

  Nothing at all like what I was feeling now. A tic or two ago, I was willing to die for love, that languorous urgency of diving hand-in-hand off a cliff into the well of despair, wrapped in nobility and the foolishness of the heart.

  No, not like that. Not even close.

  Here, shivering uncontrollably in a fetal position of I-give-up, all I wanted was to be put out of my misery.

  Take a rusty blade and scour my intestines out, spoon my heart and viscera onto the floor of this wretched landscape, find ravens to peck out my seeping eyeballs, bath my flesh in hot blood, foaming and soaping each follicle until the last spark retreats, leaving naught but a cold, hard carcass sprawled on the cold, hard ground in a cold, hard world…

  “Wake up!” Fane’s cold nose prodded at my shoulder but it was Jef’s insistent throaty bark that rousted me.

  “I’m hungry.”

  “You’re always hungry.” Fane panted in agreement.

  Guilty as charged. Asceticism didn’t work unless your heart’s desire, or some particularly critical bodily function, could be denied. The monk gig wasn’t an easy path. So, yes. I was always hungry, just not for what they were thinking.

  My trousers tightened uncomfortably, reminding me that the legs were frozen boards and the rest of me wasn’t far behind.

  A vampvomitsicle.

  Jefrumael and young master Fane conferred quietly while I got my shit together: an apt term, considering my state of dress and overall disgusting demeanor. By the time I’d braced my back against unforgiving bark and shook off the snow coating my shoulders, the boys had come to some kind of agreement.

  No mean feat since Fane was still wagging his tail and Jeffy was doing a good dog, good boy impression.

  Fane once more took to the uphill climb and Jef followed more slowly. He actually looked about as stiff and miserable as I felt. Perhaps I shouldn’t be so hasty to think myself the only one teetering in a world of hurt. After all, the assassin was a one hundred percent southern boy, used to dry heat and lots of it.

  I muttered, “Damn it,” and plodded behind the blond giant, thankful he was keeping his stride to something I could step in rather than snowplowing my way through the growing drifts.

  It had been mid-morning when the wolves had come calling. There was no way to discern time in the woods, not with a lowering sky and visibility down to the next tree, if you were lucky. I lost sight of Jef often enough to give me an arrhythmia but I put one foot in front of another, grunting with the effort.

  We were climbing. A ten percent grade. Maybe more. Steep enough that grabbing onto a sapling or a tree trunk became the only way to negotiate the phantom path that gradually opened up as we approached the tree line.

  The snow was coming down gangbusters, filling in the divots left by my guide faster than I could step in them. Pausing to catch my demon breath, I lost sight of everything but a wall of white that blanketed sound and sussed me toward the last thing I wanted or needed: stasis.

  Like hypothermia, it was a beguiling temptation, a surcease of all feeling except a false sense of well-being. It was that moment of suspension between fighting to survive and needing to understand why survival was important. In that gray area, a disconnect formed: between needing and wanting to live … and realizing the futility of either. The body succumbed, going gently into a goodnight of peace, spared the petty concerns of free will and railing against fate.

  Stasis neither refreshed nor revitalized. And it never masked the fact that death was an option.

  On the contrary, with stasis … death became the only option.

  “Is he going to be alright?” Fane sounded concerned, or maybe annoyed.

  “I guess.” Definitely annoyed.

  “He needs to feed.”

  “We’re all hungry. Sire.”

  There was that Sire again. Now I was annoyed. But I kept my eyes shut, vectoring my breathing into the steady rise and fall of sleep, and listened.

  Fane grumbled something unintelligible to which Jef groused, “Well, you didn’t have to tote his ass up the side of a mountain. Why the hell couldn’t you find us something in the valley?”

  More explanations. The cabin was empty. There was no other shelter nearby. Blah. Blah. Blah.

  It also had one, and only one, cot and I was buried under stinky sheepskin rugs in an effort to bring my core temperature up to vamp standard: lower than a human’s but way too low for a demon. My best estimation, now that I was awake, was that I was functional.

  What that meant in real terms was anybody’s guess. So I shifted the sheep’s clothing aside, stretched and sat up.

  Bad, bad move.

  Jef held my head while Fane shoved a small metal pail under my chin.

  “Altitude sickness,” Fane bumped my Adam’s apple to kick-start the festivities, then assured me, “…it’ll pass.”

  One of them wiped my mouth and perched me against the rough log wall, the other did a quick trip outside to dispose of the contents of the pail. I kept my eyes shut and my mind zeroed in on this can’t be happening.

  Denial might not be a river in Egypt but it was surely a ribbon of compensation when your life spins out of control. There was no reason, none whatsoever, for either my ex-lover or my sycophantic guard-cum-acolyte to give a rat’s ass about whether or not I lived or died.

  To think they cared, even in a dispassionate it’s-my-job kind of way, no longer made any sense. If Dad wanted me, really wanted me, he’d have come himself and swept me back to Demon Central.

  He didn’t. That little action, or rather inaction, told me volumes about where I stood. For him, I was a curiosity worth observing.

  Better yet, I was bait.

  And there was that little matter of the missing nuke. The wolves’ pursuit indicated that they thought I might have it, or at least know where to find the device. It would explain their persistence. If I factored out the device, then I still had to explain their ungodly interest in me.

  Note to self: the next time I go into stasis, don’t do it in a crate filled with ordnance and a tactical nuke lacking a spec sheet.

  I could go on and on, spinning my wheels, trying to figure it out, but the bottom line was: somehow the pack’s misapprehension that I had a set of skills useful to t
heir cause célèbre coincided with Pop’s plan to recover said device for his own particular use.

  That left me, Fane and Jef on everybody’s persons-of-interest list.

  In Romania. In a blizzard. On top of some unnamed peak in the Carpathian Mountains.

  As far as I was concerned, the Brotherhood of Three could just leave me here. Fane could go on home, wherever home was. Jefrumael could do a poof! and head for warmer climes, maybe kill a competitor or two to take Dad’s mind off him shirking his responsibility.

  I said as much. “Just leave me.” I stood, weaving unsteadily and bracing a hand against the wall. “I mean it.”

  Sort of.

  Both of them stood next to a roughed in stone fireplace, their backs to the flames, faces hidden in shadow. Two tall, gorgeous men, one dark and broody, the other fair and devilishly youthful, both sex-on-a-stick hot. I rubbed my hands on my thighs, my bare thighs.

  “Do you want to or should I?”

  Want to what?

  “You fed him last time. I’ll take a turn.”

  “Be careful.”

  Careful, why do they need to be careful?

  Jef chuckled, “He’s a greedy little bastard. Maybe we should both…?”

  The taller, stockier figure moved first, panther lethal, hips swiveling seductively. Fane. Eyes riveted on my nakedness, my interest.

  Hunger, sharp hunger flared like a searing inferno, igniting a lust so powerful I was nearly mad with it.

  Ripping the knotted vein wide open, Fane pressed his wrist onto my parched lips as he eased me down onto the cot, the sounds of my frantic suckling coating the walls with desire, the crackling flames in staccato rhythm with my wolf’s heartbeat.

  Stutter, step. Stutter step. Stutter…

  I couldn’t bear to look at his face, the face I adored beyond all reason.

  The assassin murmured, “I’ll tie…,” the words lost as he stretched my arms above my head, piercing soft flesh with harsh hemp, securing my upper body so I could not twist away or push off or fight. Cloth, rough like wool, scratchy and dense, nailed my eyelids shut, blanking out sight and light, leaving me with harsh intakes of breath and the soft scrap of bare feet on wood floor.

  To Fane, my tormentor said, “That’s enough. Leave him hungry.”

  Yes, hungry. I ached with hunger. The sub cringed with it, awaited the punishment, begging for it, arching my hips and spreading thighs virulent with need.

  Jef stroked my cheek, rough pad against stubble, the reassurance soft and sweet. “Ssh. I won’t hurt you.”

  But he will, he wants it more than anything … my Fane.

  Mouthing do it, I surrendered as Fane captured my tongue, invading my mouth, his taste so familiar and delicious I nearly cried out with joy. Hard hands gripped my face, holding me still as my wolf growled his fierce lust, soft full lips exploring, nipping.

  Ragged breathing above me, wicked, swift pinches lifting nipples to a point of rigid pain. Jefrumael hissing yessss as Fane encased my cock in his hot mouth, pulling hard, then releasing.

  Thumbs stroked my throat, lifting and arching my neck until the tendons threatened to rupture and the pulse beat with thick, rich desire. Sheathed in downy softness, the bloom of youth brushed with tantalizing strokes across my lips, while my wolf teased and tempted until I had no sense of who did what. Every sensation blended into exaltations of sheer ecstasy, without beginning, without end.

  I moaned into my angel’s mouth, unprepared for the exquisite torture of Fane invading my very soul, pummeling and ravaging with every shred of anger and jealousy and frustration that he’d carried since the day I’d betrayed his trust.

  Strong fingers wrapped my cock, slip-sliding up, down—with every thrust a squeeze, flesh slapping flesh.

  “Let me do that.”

  Jef. Oh god, my demon, Jef. Encasing the steel of my desire, melting it, driving me into a panic of despair, fearing he, they, would deny me release, redemption. Blood flooded my mouth, my fangs puncturing my inner lip, a slow drip, drip, drip down the back of my throat, like acid, like velvety satin sweetness.

  Close, so close.

  The wolf howled his triumph as the demon pierced flesh, shards of agony and ecstasy lancing my spine, leaving my thighs a quivering mass and my throat gagging on the misery of my existence.

  Jerking against the restraints I ached as waves of crushing pleasure moved in ever expanding ripples, every nerve vibrating in harmony, so beautiful it cut, so undeserving it crushed my spirit. The sensation buried my lust under such purity, such clarity, that I swooned with its corruption of temperance.

  I would die from happiness. I would.

  But stasis took me first.

  Chapter Eight

  “Are you alright?”

  Silence, a sigh, an inhale. Fane spoke softly, as if fearful I would hear. “I can’t do this.”

  Do what? Love me?

  A callous shrug, the image exploding behind my eyelids, cracked to glimpse, not to see. It was enough.

  Jefrumael stroked my wolf, a single finger tracing the bulge of a cheekbone, the tenderness of care so true, so right, I could not bear to watch, yet I did. Stopping short of jealous rage, I listened with my heart, undeserving to my very core.

  What do you want, dearest Fane? Tell me. Please. I cannot bear losing you but if I must…

  “It’s his nature, you know.”

  A piece of me cringed at that honesty; it stung for all the casual disregard for my feelings. For Fane. For my demon.

  They stood by the fire again, side-by-side now, the demon’s hand resting lightly on my lover’s shoulder. Possessiveness I recognized and understood, friendship less so for I’d had few in my long life. There seemed little difference here. Either way the pangs of envy labored with my need to comprehend, to be the man my Stefan deserved.

  My concern for the pup, for his happiness, overrode good sense, if I’d ever had any. Even knowing the demon could be my fallback should Fane decide to leave me, it would never be enough.

  Would I rather be alone for the rest of my days than to allow the demon to pleasure my flesh to distraction? A few short weeks ago I would have said no, without reservation, gleeful over my conquest. Self-absorbed. Selfish. My third eye blind to all but sensation.

  No longer needing to fake being asleep, I sat up and gawped with voyeuristic dismay as Jefrumael spun my wolf into a tender embrace, his lips seeking Fane’s with such sweet desire, I clutched my belly as bile and jealousy spewed ugly venom into my heart and soul.

  Don’t…

  Please don’t…

  He’s too young. Don’t confuse him…

  “Sire,” Jefrumael’s voice hissed and reverbed, nearly lost in the spit and singe of the flames, “let me pleasure you.”

  Oh yes, my demon. Pleasure him. Pleasure me.

  Fane turned away, his gaze locked, pinpointing something above the demon’s shoulder, considering. With slow movements, the pup cradled his cock, the emerging alpha wolf shivering in anticipation as the demon knelt and stroked his thighs: a swift pull on the rough denim, a sweep upward, pressing Fane’s hands close, tight on his rigid erection.

  A groan.

  Mine? His?

  Licking my lips, sidling closer, wanting to see, not wanting to see, needing to touch, to taste.

  The demon ignored me, though he knew I approached, needy and pleading, a supplicant for Fane’s favors. Weary of pride, I set it aside, willing to share if need be, if that was the only way he would have me.

  When had my world turned upside down? I was the son of Michel du Velours. The assassin owed me allegiance, yet he poached the one thing that was truly mine and mine alone. I would sacrifice all, lay my soul at the altar of Fane’s fancy to let him do with me as he pleased. This was not something to be treated with such arrogant disdain.

  They knew that, all of them. I had offered my heart, freely. And then I had thrown it all away … and I could not even blame my lust or my own foolish choices.

 
; The Fates had decreed my path, but the consequences were my own to bear for all eternity.

  Sinking to my knees, rubbing my fists into eyes filled with tears, I silently sobbed my agony and despair, keening to the rhythm of Jefrumael deep throating my lover’s cock, each grunt, each groan, each oh gods yes a knife stab to my gut.

  “St-st-stop.”

  Blood pulsed in microbursts: harsh, loud, insistent. I almost missed Fane’s words.

  “I can’t.”

  Not daring to look up, I waited, as time suspended inside the cabin. Not slowed but halted, as if it had encountered a barricade, a barrier. And on the other side, there was … hope.

  The sound of teeth grating across rigid flesh, a pfft of dismay and breath indrawn, so tight and swift it reeked of a different kind of passion.

  Anger.

  My wolf seethed. I could feel it in my bones. The air electrified. He was changing. Man become beast and yet I dared not see, for there still lived the fear, the uncertainty. That his wrath would be directed at me, not the demon.

  “Sire?” The demon voiced petulance and disrespect, the subtext mocking.

  I doubted Fane would understand what had happened. He would never see how Jefrumael had maneuvered me into revealing how far I would go, what I was willing to sacrifice. How much I would grovel and capitulate to save my wolf, emotionally disemboweling myself. The assassin had lived up to his reputation: taking me to the brink and pausing, waiting to see if I had the balls to challenge or acknowledge the final submission.

  To be a sub did not mean losing the self, though to outsiders it might appear that way. As with everything, there were lines one did not cross, not and remain sane. But I had chosen the ultimate sacrifice. To keep Fane, to set him free—either way, I would desert all that I was to become an empty shell in service to an emotion of which I had no little or no understanding.

  Stefan had saved me that last indignity.

  Well played, Jefrumael. Well played, Michel du Velours.

  Nails clicked on scarred wood, the pace restless, as fairy dust fur tickled my senses. He huffed and my skin thrilled to the promise, my own hairs tingling and rising to the sweet invasion. Rocking back on my heels, I finally gazed upon my tormentor.