by Larissa Ione
Shade scrubbed a hand over his face. “I can’t believe we didn’t see this coming.”
“See what?” Wraith snapped, at the end of his patience.
“Our life forces are bound to the hospital,” E said softly. “You’re dying.…”
Ah, fuck. Wraith exhaled slowly. “So the hospital is dying. That’s why strange shit is happening there.”
“Yeah.”
Nausea rolled through him. “Is that also why it’s running half-staffed?”
E shook his head. “Whatever is shaking up the underworld is shaking up the staff. They aren’t showing up for shifts. Quitting. They’re terrified. Things are a mess. And, oddly enough, it all coincides with the charmed human’s appearance on the scene.”
“Dammit,” Wraith breathed. He might not give a crap about much, but the hospital had given him a purpose in life, at a time when he’d been directionless and self-destructive. Not that he wasn’t those things now, but he’d mellowed a lot. He was probably still alive only because of his brothers and the hospital.
More important, it meant the world to E and Shade. More than anything except their mates and Shade’s offspring. Wraith might not give a shit about his own life, but he couldn’t let the hospital die just because he didn’t want to bang and kill a human.
He was really a piss-poor excuse for a demon.
It was time to let that particular childhood trauma go. If he didn’t, his mother would win. She’d wanted him dead from the moment he was born, thanks to the horror his father had inflicted on her. Not that Wraith could blame her—she’d been a human on the verge of turning into a vampire when his father had raped her, then kept her just this side of alive with the same gift Shade possessed. For nine months he’d kept her in a horrible stasis, raping and abusing her until she gave birth.
Not surprisingly, she’d gone insane. His father had taken off after he was born, as all unmated Seminus demons did—although usually they abandoned the female immediately after sex and conception.
His mother had completed her transformation into a vampire, becoming vicious as well as insane, and had taken out her anger on Wraith. He’d fought to live, and though he’d done some incredibly stupid things to get himself killed as an adult, something deep inside always kept fighting.
So fuck it. He was going to live. He was going to find the charmed human, take what he needed, and rock on.
And once he was nicely charmed and invincible, he was going to start taking out vampires in a way he’d wanted to do since he’d broken free of his cage. Starting with the Vamp Council.
Oh, yeah. Let the good times roll.
Wraith’s plan to find and seduce the human woman hit a roadblock right away
The fancy shmancy New Haven mansion where she lived was warded against demons.
For hours, Wraith was forced to lurk in the woods that hugged the expansive and well-tended grounds, but when a middle-aged man came out, loaded his Mercedes with luggage, and climbed behind the wheel, Wraith struck.
He tore across the paved drive and slipped into the back seat.
“What the—” The man’s breath cut off as Wraith’s arm went around his neck. The guy flailed, landing a blow on Wraith’s chin before Wraith wrenched his head between his palms. A second later, Wraith was using his Seminus gift to get inside the dude’s mind and do a little probing.
The man, Valeriu, possessed some impressive mental blocks that hindered Wraith, but not for long. Soon, he learned that Serena had left for Egypt the night before, and that she was supposed to collect some sort of key from a man named Josh in… shit, an hour.
Quickly, Wraith filled Valeriu’s head with new memories, ones that would cover up the fact that he’d been attacked on his own grounds. Once he was done, he put the guy to sleep, so although Valeriu might wonder why he’d fallen asleep behind the wheel, he wouldn’t remember.
Wraith slipped out of the car and sprinted to the nearest Harrowgate. He had to get to that Josh guy. Now he knew that the key to the treasure Serena was hunting was also the key to her.
Serena had always liked Egypt, and Alexandria was her favorite of all Egyptian cities. Known as The Pearl of the Mediterranean, it boasted beautiful residential districts, elegant gardens, and a Mediterranean, rather than Middle Eastern, atmosphere
She’d spent the day trying to locate the first of the two objects she’d come for in an ancient vault beneath the city. Just as the sun began to set, she found it. Its resting place, anyway. Unfortunately, Kom El-Shuqafa’s visiting hours forced her to give up for the day. Val had managed to finagle special access to off-limits areas of the catacombs, but apparently visiting hours were not negotiable.
Besides, if Val was right, she’d need a key to access the vault, and she was already late to meet Josh at her hotel.
She caught a cab, but as usual traffic was a tangle of cars, donkey carts, bikes, and pedestrians. The narrow streets, minor accidents, and non-functioning traffic lights made for extremely slow progress. Ancient Egyptians could have built an entire pyramid in the time it took her taxi to go a single block.
Fed up, starving, and a nervous wreck after watching several pedestrians nearly get run over, she scrambled out of the cab several blocks from her hotel, figuring she could walk faster than the cab could get her there.
Dressed conservatively in tan cargoes and a long-sleeved, white cotton blouse, she didn’t draw much attention, although her blond hair and blue eyes screamed “foreigner.” No woman should walk alone on these streets, but Serena was safer than if she’d been traveling with an entire army of guards.
The uneven, cracked sidewalks posed no problem for her as she walked, caressed by a light breeze off the harbor. All around, shopkeepers and restaurant owners hawked their goods, which ranged from clothing to fresh vegetables to roast pigeon that scented the air with spice as Serena passed.
Ahead, a man approached, his flowing brown dishdasha flapping around his ankles, his white, bucketlike taqiya cap soaking up the evening shadows and the pale lights from the nearby buildings. He walked with his head down, but when he stepped in front of Serena his head came up, and she drew in a startled breath. The man was beautiful. So beautiful it hurt to look at him. He radiated a glow as fierce as the sun’s reflection off the gold dome of the mosque of Sultan Omar Ali Saifuddin, and his features were so perfect he could have been drawn with a camel-hair brush.
“Serena.”
She didn’t stop to think how he knew her name, because his musically lilted voice had mesmerized her. She didn’t recognize the accent, but it sounded familiar in an ancient sort of way.
“Yes,” she breathed, and his lips curved in a smile that turned her brain to mush.
He cast a furtive glance around them, and it was then that she noticed the normally bustling street was deserted. Her self-preservation and survival instincts were rusty from disuse, but now they stirred, as though awakening from a deep, dark sleep. The sensation was strange, but she recognized it for what it was—danger.
Still, she wasn’t afraid. Nothing could touch her. Even so, she automatically brushed her fingers over the pendant beneath her blouse. It was a stupid habit, but one she couldn’t break any more than she could break the enchanted chain from which it hung. Oddly, the necklace felt hot against her skin.
“Hey.”
Another deep male voice came from behind her, and she turned to the newcomer, a man casually dressed in faded jeans and a Guinness T-shirt, with a backpack draped over his shoulder. He was tall, close to six and a half feet, with blond hair that fell nearly to his shoulders and a tattoo that extended from the fingers of his right arm all the way up to his face, where the swirling black pattern stretched from his jawline to his temple.
It struck her that this man was the source of the danger vibes. She could feel it in the way her body flushed with warmth, the way her skin tingled, the way her pulse leaped.
“Y-yes?” Dolt. Not only had she stammered, but she’d sounded all breathless, like
a Renfield meeting her first vampire.
The dishdasha guy turned to the other man. “Leave us.” His commanding tone made her jump, but the T-shirted guy merely held up his hands.
“Hey, dude, I’m supposed to be here. What’s your deal?”
She eyed the blond. “Josh?”
“Yup. I was just heading to the hotel to meet you.” He gave Dishdasha a pointed look, and wow, Val could have mentioned that his buddy was movie-star hot and bore the physical confidence of a freaking Navy SEAL. “This asshole bothering you?”
“Uh…” Yet another intelligent response. God, she was lame.
The air seemed to shimmer with aggression, and there was that danger sensation again, making her skin tingle and her heart race. Something was going on here, but what, she didn’t know. All she knew was that two impossibly gorgeous men were staring each other down like rival tomcats, and she was in the middle of it all.
Something primal and feminine in her got excited, overriding her brain, which screamed that there was no way anything so abnormal could be good. After a long, tense moment, the man wearing the dishdasha bowed his head and turned to Serena.
“My name is Byzam al-Majid. Val sent me to assist you in your search.”
Josh snorted. “You gonna to buy that? Because this guy has scam written all over his strangely smooth forehead.”
The situation was weird; she couldn’t deny that, and she knew damned good and well that if Val was going to send someone other than Josh, he would have contacted her.
Smiling politely, she clutched her knapsack closer to her body. “I don’t mean to be rude, Mr. al-Majid, but you understand that I’ll need to contact Val about this.”
“Of course.” He bowed and backed away. “I’ll be in touch.”
She felt a strange sense of relief as he melted away into the night… until she realized she was now alone with the other man, the one who emanated erotic strength and fierce sensuality.
Swallowing, she looked up as he towered over her, one corner of his lush mouth tilted in the cockiest grin she’d ever seen. She dropped her gaze to broad shoulders that tested the limits of his tee’s elasticity, let herself admire his deep chest and narrow waist, made for a woman to wrap her legs around.
Val had said Josh was an ex-Guardian, and she could imagine him making the most of his warrior build to battle demons and satisfy a woman’s needs in bed.
He wasn’t wearing a wedding ring.…
Normally she’d take the opportunity to flirt, to let her wild side have a little fun. But just standing next to him brought the sensation of danger flaring to life within her. She had no doubt that he was dangerous in a lethal, animal way… and that the true menace was to everything that made her a woman. Especially her virginity.
Oh, yes, this man was scary, in more ways than she could count, or probably imagine.
Chapter 5
Wraith allowed himself a moment to revel in his victory but he didn’t get cocky. This wasn’t over yet. Still, the evidence of Serena’s attraction surrounded him: a faint, musky aroma of arousal mixed with her own clean, vanilla-almond scent. Oh, yeah, she wanted him.
So much for not getting cocky. But hey, were-leopards couldn’t change their spots, right?
Shadows had swallowed up Byzam—what a bullshit name—but Wraith kept his eyes peeled. “We should go before he comes back. Something about him wasn’t right.”
Serena narrowed her gaze at him, but her tone was teasing when she said, “How do I know you’re any safer?”
Winking, he turned on the charm. “You don’t.”
“Well, at least you’re honest.”
“Not nearly as often as I should be.”
She cocked a blond eyebrow. “Good to know. I’ll keep my guard up, even if you are a friend of Val’s and an ex-Guardian.”
Guardian. Yeah, that had been an interesting revelation. He’d had to leave Val too quickly to extract much detail from his mind, but once he got to Josh in his hotel room, he’d spent a little extra time learning what the guy’s deal was. Then he’d made Josh believe he’d already met with Serena and needed to head home. Hopefully, the real Josh was already checked out of the hotel and on a plane bound for Italy.
Serena would be all his.
Wraith’s eyes went to the V of her blouse, which was buttoned too conservatively for his taste, and then down, to her tiny waist that flared into hips she probably thought were too wide but which excited both the primal male and the horny incubus in him. Her body was made to buffer a male’s lust, and for carrying his offspring.
The former would happen, the latter would not. He could sense fertility in any female, and Serena wasn’t ovulating. Besides, no self-respecting Seminus impregnated a human. Offspring born of other demon species would be purebred Seminus demons; those born to human women would be half-breeds, and of no use when it came to carrying on the Seminus breed.
Wraith reluctantly dragged his gaze back up to her face and tried to forget she was human. “Honey, as hot as you are, you shouldn’t trust any man.”
Her easy laughter cut through the cool night, and through his gut. He liked the soft, feminine sound in a way that left him feeling vulnerable… and that he didn’t like.
“You’re smooth,” she said. “I’ll give you that. Something tells me you leave a trail of broken hearts in your wake.”
He crossed his fingers over his own heart. “I promise not to leave any on the way to the hotel.”
She snorted and started down the sidewalk. “Gee, thanks, Josh.”
“My friends call me Wraith.”
She grimaced. “Wraith? That’s a horrible nickname. I’ll call you Josh.”
Great. Just great. Bad enough that he had to pretend to be nice. Now he had to do it while being called Josh.
Wraith stayed cocked and ready as they hoofed it toward the hotel. He wasn’t sure what was up with the creepy Byzam dude, but he knew without a doubt that the male wasn’t human. Which meant he was up to no good. Maybe he was after Serena’s charm, maybe he’d learned why she was in Egypt and wanted whatever she was after. Either way, his presence was a thorn in Wraith’s side. The last thing he needed was interference.
Wraith’s gaze returned to Serena’s lithe, graceful body. Her breasts were smaller than he liked, but when it came down to it, he didn’t have to like her. He was after one thing. Still, he’d be stuck with her for a few hours at least, so he might as well observe. And it wasn’t as if she was hard on the eyes. Far from it.
She was short, maybe five-feet-five, with wavy blond hair she’d pulled into a high ponytail that stuck through the hole in her beige baseball cap. Long eyelashes framed big brown eyes shot through with gold. High cheekbones added definition to a slightly rounded face, and her generous mouth tipped crookedly to the right when she smiled.
“Are you staying at my hotel?” she asked as they halted at the corner of a busy street. He loved the natural, sultry rasp in her voice that made everything sound as if she’d added “in bed” to the end of every sentence.
“Yup. Flew in this afternoon. I’m already checked in.”
“You live in Italy, right?” She had to yell over the sound of a honking horn.
He nodded, recalling what he’d extracted from Josh’s mind, and said, “I’m originally from Ohio, but I’ve been in Perugia for the last six months.” He had no idea why Josh had moved there, so he hoped she didn’t ask.
“I love Italy.” In bed. Her smile grew dreamy, and he really wished she wouldn’t do that, because it made him want to kiss her.
Which was crazy, because he’d never kissed a female before, not in his hundred years of life. But suddenly he wanted to put his mouth on Serena’s and see what all the fuss was about.
She watched him, her eyes glittering with curiosity, and he wondered if she felt the static crackle of awareness between them. When her gaze slid to his mouth and she swayed, he knew she did.
In an almost dreamlike state, he drew closer to her. His
vampire senses picked up her sweet scent, the sound of her pulse rate increasing. His own went erratic and off the charts as he leaned in. Anticipation made his skin tingle, but out of nowhere a foul scent like burning flesh hijacked the air.
He started, shaken out of his insanity. Oh, he was going to kiss her—Tayla had given him a damn primer on what human women liked, and she insisted kissing was part of seduction—but pouncing on Serena out in the open was probably not the way to go.
“Do you smell that?” He swung his head around, zeroing in on the odor. There, behind a truck parked on an incline between two closed-up shops… eyes. Red, glowing eyes.
“I don’t smell anything—”
“Stay here.” He peeled off toward the threat, his body revved for battle, adrenaline pumping hotly through his veins.
The creature behind the truck growled, a chilling sound that made the hair on the back of Wraith’s neck stand up. This was a khnive, a summoned demon tracker bound by its master to do his bidding until the spell controlling it timed out.
“What is it?”
Wraith paused at Serena’s voice. She was right behind him. “I told you to stay where you were.”
“Last time I looked, you weren’t my boss.”
So she was sexy and spirited. An admirable yet annoying combination.
“Stay.” He sprinted toward the creature. It screeched and skittered down the street toward a drainage hole. If it escaped, it would report to its master that it had found Serena. “Oh, no you don’t.”
Wraith grabbed the creature, which looked like a mastiff-sized skinned opossum, by its ratlike tail. It wheeled around, snapping razor-sharp teeth.
“Bad monster.” Wraith flipped it with a flick of his wrist. It landed awkwardly on its side with a snap of bone, but the injury didn’t stop it. The demon came at him, a drooling, fire-eyed abomination—
A backpack smashed into its face and the khnive yelped, rearing backward and clawing at its eye, which had been impaled by a pencil. Serena clobbered the creature again, and it struck out at her with venom-laced claws, but somehow missed despite its close proximity.