Ashton dropped his cigarette. “Where have you been?” he asked, his voice as quiet as Zachariah’s. A soft thudding reached Zachariah’s ears, and he looked around again before he realized what he was hearing: Ashton’s heartbeat. The thrum of it was deep and seductive, enticing him in. Zachariah realized his teeth were aching. He ran his tongue over the sharp points and struggled to stay on the bike.
“I can assure you, it’s not a place I wanted to be,” Zachariah said. He ran a hand through his hair to push it back from his face and studied Ashton through the darkness. The other man looked like he hadn’t slept a wink since before Zachariah’s disappearance. His dark hair was unusually disheveled, and his suit was wrinkled like he’d laid on it, a far cry from his usual militaristic care of his appearance. He felt a surge of concern over Ashton’s health.
As he studied Ashton, the man studied him in return. Zachariah wondered what he saw. Could he tell that Zachariah’s skin was too pale, that his pulse beat too slowly, that his blood no longer pumped at the speed it should have through his veins? The sharpness of his nails and the oddities that had become his eyes weren’t visible through the black leather gloves or the dark sunglasses he wore. But did he wonder why Zachariah wore them? Or did he already know? Zachariah’s stomach turned at the thought, and he swallowed and rested his hands against the grips of his motorcycle. He scanned the other man for weapons, especially the kind that could kill him. He didn’t see any. But that didn’t mean they weren’t there.
Ashton stepped out of the light of the doorway and let the door swing closed behind him, cutting off his escape route. Zachariah thought that was stupid. Ashton didn’t know what had happened to him, even if he did suspect, and allowing himself to be trapped outside with what could have possibly been a newborn vampire elder was dangerous. No one in the Unnaturals understood that better than Zachariah. He’d made it his job to study and learn everything he could about the elders. He above all others knew what they were capable of.
“Are you okay?” Ashton asked as he reached the halfway point across the sidewalk. Zachariah put up a hand to signal for him to stop. The rumble of the man’s heartbeat had grown louder, and thirst had flooded his mouth. Feeding from Elise had only taken the edge off, and having Ashton so close was almost too much to bear.
“Please, don’t come any closer,” Zachariah pleaded. “I don’t know what I’d do if—” He broke off and shook his head.
“If what?” Ashton prompted. When Zachariah didn’t answer, he took another step closer and cocked his head to the side, studying Zachariah. “What did they do to you?”
“Ash, it isn’t a good idea to ask any questions,” Zachariah said. He glanced around them, searching for vampires. According to Elise, he’d sense them if they were near. But he didn’t trust anything she’d told him. She could have lied to him so he’d keep his guard down.
“Why not?” Ashton persisted. He took another step, his forehead creased with worry, and Zachariah tensed. The man’s scent, so familiar and attractive to him, had flooded his nose, and he struggled to keep control.
“Ash, please,” Zachariah choked out. Tremors ran through his body, and his control began to slip. Before he could stop himself, before he realized what he’d done, he lunged off of his motorcycle. He grasped the front of Ashton’s suit jacket and backed him up so quickly that Ashton lost his footing, and the only thing that kept him from tumbling to the sidewalk was Zachariah’s grip on his clothes. He slammed the man against the brick wall and glared at him, almost panting, the heady scent of Ashton filling his lungs and the sound of his heart thundering in his ears. As they collided with the wall, Zachariah tore his sunglasses off, the bright streetlights making them burn and sting, and let Ashton get the full view of his eyes.
Ashton looked at him in horror as he took in the first immediate evidence of his turning. He knew what it must have looked like: his pupils slit like a cat’s, his eyes a strange yellow color and no longer the green they’d been before. Despite his attempts to keep calm, he bore his sharp teeth at Ashton. “I told you not to get too close,” he hissed, pressing his body firmly against Ashton’s, pinning him to the wall. The overwhelming need to sink his teeth into Ashton’s neck rippled through his mind. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
Ashton composed himself as Zachariah continued to fight the urge to attack, and he stared at him with his single good eye, his fear gone and something like pity and sadness left behind. “Jesus,” he breathed. “Can we stop it? Is the lore true?”
Zachariah hesitated. “I don’t know.”
Ashton clenched his jaw and studied Zachariah, his eye flickering over his face. “What do you need me to do? Do you need me to…to kill you? I know you don’t want to live like this—”
“No, I don’t,” Zachariah acknowledged. “But I don’t want you to deal with it yet. I’ve got some other problems to handle first. There’s a lot more going on than I initially thought, and this might actually help.”
“Anything I can do?” Ashton asked. Despite Zachariah’s orders for him to keep his distance, he touched Zachariah’s jaw. Zachariah turned his face away.
“Yeah, there’s one thing you can do,” Zachariah said. “That file I gave you, the one about the twenty-seven agents that were murdered. I need you to help me complete that investigation and find out who is behind it.”
“Is that something that’s going to help you?”
“Immensely.” Zachariah hesitated, wondering how much was safe to tell him, and then blew out a breath and added, “The woman who did this to me…she said that someone in the Agency is behind the murders.”
“And how would she know that?”
“Because she’s the one who killed the agents,” Zachariah said. “Against her will, by all appearances.”
Ashton frowned. “But who in the Agency is strong enough to control a vampire? And not only a vampire, an elder?”
“I don’t know,” Zachariah said. “But he’s got some serious leverage against her, and that’s what she needs me to help her with. Only I can’t exactly drop into the office and start weeding through paperwork. I need you to be my liaison, so to speak, and handle the paperwork end of things for me while I investigate.” He paused for a moment, looking away from Ashton. “When I’m…when I’m ready for all this to be over, when it is over, I’ll come back to you, okay?” The look in Ashton’s eye was deep and sorrowful and understanding. Zachariah swallowed hard, feeling the thirst at the back of his throat again. He rested his forehead against Ashton’s and closed his eyes. “I can’t handle being out there hurting innocent people. I will not be responsible for the death of someone who didn’t deserve it.”
“I know,” Ashton agreed. His fingers fisted into Zachariah’s shirt, and he pulled him in closer and wrapped his arms around him, burying his face against his neck. “Please tell me you’re going to be okay,” he mumbled. Zachariah felt him sag against him, and he embraced him in return, practically holding him up.
“I can’t promise that, Ash,” he admitted as sadness washed over him. “You know that.”
Ashton blew out a slow breath and nodded. “Yeah, I know,” he said, pulling back a little to look him in the face. “Just…be careful, okay?”
“Of course!” Zachariah closed his eyes for a moment more, reveling in the feeling of Ashton’s hands pressed against his back and his arms wrapped around his body. “I’ll call you when and if anything changes.”
“Chances are the numbers won’t be the same,” Ashton warned. “I’m carrying a burner phone right now. How am I supposed to get the number to you—”
“You trust me, right?” Zachariah asked, forcing himself to take a half-step back. “I know how we can handle that, but you’ve got to trust me. It could get you…you could get into some serious trouble with the Agency if…” He trailed off. “But it’ll allow me to track you no matter where you are.” Ashton seemed to realize what he was asking, and he didn’t hesitate to shrug off his suit jacket and start unbutto
ning his dress shirt.
“I can deal with the Agency,” he said, working on his shirt’s buttons as he spoke. “That isn’t an issue.”
Zachariah grabbed Ashton’s hands, stilling them, and asked, “Are you sure? Are you absolutely sure?”
“Of course,” Ashton said. “I know what I’m risking. I know that if they find out I spoke to you…they’ll haul me in front of Internal Affairs. I’ve dealt with them on your behalf before, and I won’t hesitate to do it again.” Zachariah knew what he was referring to. Three years before, only a mere handful of months after they’d first met on a double-booked mission in Prague, Zachariah had been captured by a drug cartel while on an undercover assignment in Bolivia and nearly killed for his efforts. Ashton had dropped everything—including the assignment he was still technically on at the time—to come in and save him, against the Agency’s wishes. Zachariah had barely made it out of there alive, and he had the physical and mental scars to go with it. Ashton, too, had faced the possibility of death at the hands of Internal Affairs for insubordination and abandonment of duty, but the charges had been dropped when Zachariah finished filing his report of the events that had happened in the grungy den he’d been kept in, including the werewolf he’d fought and killed singlehandedly. Both of them had been unceremoniously dumped into the project of creating The Unnaturals after that, where they’d been to this day. “I know that I’m putting my life on the line for you again,” Ashton continued, pulling Zachariah out of his thoughts. “But Zach, when you come back and you ask me to put you down…I won’t live very long past that. So my life is forfeit either way. I can’t handle doing this job alone.”
“I hate it when you talk like that,” Zachariah said. He pushed Ashton’s hands down to his sides and began to unbutton the man’s shirt himself. He shoved it off his shoulders and pulled his t-shirt aside, baring Ashton’s shoulder and neck. He swallowed hard and stared at the man’s pulse fluttering under his smooth skin. “You sure about this?”
“Yes, Zach, I’m sure,” Ashton said. “Get on with it before I change my mind, would you?”
Zachariah nodded and leaned in close, closing his eyes and breathing in the man’s scent again. He could hear Ashton’s heartbeat in his ears, roaring like an ocean wave, and he could almost smell the blood through his skin. He let go of Ashton’s shirt, rested his hands on his biceps to keep the man still, and pressed his lips to his pulse. He dragged his teeth against Ashton’s skin, hesitating, giving the man a chance to back out and change his mind. He couldn’t say with any positivity that he wanted Ashton to—his thirst was too incessant for that—but he wanted to offer him the opportunity. When the man’s fingertips brushed against the hair at the back of his head, Zachariah gave in to the temptation and slowly, gently sank his teeth into the man’s flesh.
The initial burst of Ashton’s blood against his tongue was the sweetest thing Zachariah had ever tasted, and he groaned in pleasure as it flooded his mouth and overwhelmed his senses. Before he could process the subtle flavors that tasted so Ashton, though, his mind was hit with a wall of sound, thoughts and images rocking through his brain so chaotically that it nearly took him to his knees. He grasped Ashton’s biceps in a bruising grip as his mind reeled from the intensity of it, pressing the man harder against the brick wall, and as he swallowed another mouthful of the sweet red fluid, another burst of imagery struck him. Mentally stumbling, Zachariah fought to gain control over the flood. As he laved his tongue over the small wounds in Ashton’s neck, he began to sift through the images that so stunned him.
They were Ashton’s memories, Zachariah realized as he ran his tongue over the man’s wounds. Most were scattershot and made no sense out of context, but several—including the night Ashton had been attacked by the vampire elder that had nearly killed him—were so intimately familiar to Zachariah that he felt the terror of the attack all over again, combined with Ashton’s own feelings of pain and fear and anger. Elise hadn’t told him this could happen, and his brain spun as he tried to grasp hold of something, anything to steady him.
A third mouthful of blood brought forth another wave of memories, more pleasant ones of when Zachariah and Ashton had first met, eating dinner together, working together, and more. It was too much for him to take, and he tore his mouth away from Ashton’s neck, panting. Elise had taught him what to do next; he cut his tongue on one of the sharp points of his teeth and licked at Ashton’s wounds, letting the blood flow over them. As he watched, the small bloody wounds in Ashton’s neck closed enough to cease bleeding, and he lapped the last trickles of blood away before licking his lips and meeting Ashton’s gaze.
“You okay?” he asked, raising a gloved hand to press it to the side of Ashton’s face. The other man had closed his eye and rested his head against the wall, and he looked rattled.
“Yeah, I just…did you see that too?” Ashton asked. “Or feel that? I’m not sure what it was. Like…images and sounds.”
“I think they were your memories,” Zachariah murmured. “That’s what I saw.”
“Then I must have seen yours, because I didn’t recognize all of them,” Ashton murmured. He wiped a hand at his neck, looking at his palm for traces of blood, and then shrugged his shirt back onto his shoulders and began to button it. “Look, what’s your plan?” he asked, shifting topics as Zachariah pondered what of his memories Ashton could have seen.
“My plan?” Zachariah asked. He raised an eyebrow and focused his attention on smoothing out his shirt and straightening his jacket, both of which had gotten rumpled during the process of drinking from Ashton. “Right now, I plan to get my bike, track down Riley and Scott, and try to help them out. Have they gotten the box yet?”
“About that…” Ashton scrubbed a hand through his hair and pushed away from the wall. His eye met Zachariah’s, and he said, “The box in the museum is a fake.”
Zachariah’s brain ground to a halt at Ashton’s words. He sucked in a breath and looked at him with wide eyes, abandoning his attempts to straighten his clothing. “Fake? It’s a fake?” he repeated. “Are you sure?”
“Riley brought back some photos,” Ashton confirmed. “There are enough inconsistencies between what the box is supposed to look like and what the one in the museum looks like that there’s no doubt in my mind it’s a fake. Are you telling me you never went to check it out for yourself?”
“I never had the time,” Zachariah admitted. “Not with the coven and Elise—” He broke off and looked down the street warily, as if saying the vampire woman’s name was enough to summon her to where he stood.
“Who is Elise?”
“Don’t worry about it,” Zachariah snapped. “And don’t say the name again. It could be dangerous.” He tugged at his glove and avoided Ashton’s gaze. “I’ll check it out. We need whatever is in that box. We don’t have a choice, and we can’t use something else. The vampire who did this to me…she’s strong. Incredibly strong. She’s the one who created the elder I killed a couple of years ago, and—”
“Is that why she did this to you? To punish you?” Ashton asked.
“She took me to be his replacement, because she needed help and an ally,” Zachariah muttered. “Believe me, I’m not happy about it. But it’s to do with the whole more-going-on-than-I-thought thing that I mentioned.” He tilted his head back, looking at the sky. It was beginning to lighten. To the human eye, it would have been imperceptible, but to his newly sharpened vision, it was obvious and served as a warning of the time he was losing talking to Ashton. “Look, I’ve got to get moving. I don’t have much time left before I have to find a place to hole up before dawn.”
“I’ve got Scott and Riley working on getting into the curator’s office,” Ashton said as Zachariah climbed back onto his bike. “They’re trying to find a lead on where the real box is. Check back with me as soon as you’re able, and I’ll let you know what they find.”
“Best you not do that, Ash,” Zachariah said, starting the bike’s engine. He used his fo
ot to lever the kickstand up and called over the rumble of the motorcycle, “Someone might be able to find out where it is through me. I don’t need to know that badly.”
“What do I tell Hartley if he calls asking where you’re at?” Ashton called back.
Zachariah stared at him as the motorcycle rumbled underneath him, the sound filling the dead air between them. Then, giving in to the impulse that had grown in him since the second he’d laid eyes on the other man, he pulled Ashton close, kissing him hard on the mouth. Ashton made a sound that he couldn’t hear but felt vibrate against his mouth, and he stumbled forward, his hands pressing against the sides of Zachariah’s face as he returned the kiss with a desperation that suggested he wasn’t expecting to ever get the opportunity to do it again. Zachariah savored the feeling of the man’s lips on his, and when he pulled away, it was with reluctance in every part of his body. Ashton let out a breath and rested his forehead against Zachariah’s again, his eye closed, as Zachariah said, just loud enough to be heard over the rumble of the motorcycle’s engine, “I don’t care what you tell Hartley, but I was never here!” He forced himself to release Ashton, pushing him back a few steps, and gunned the motorcycle’s engine. He drove half onto the sidewalk to turn around before looping onto the street and speeding into the darkness. He kept his eyes locked on the road ahead and tried to not think about the man he was leaving behind him and his inevitable death at the end of the mission.
~*~
“Son of a bitch!”
Henry’s shout echoed through his office suite, and the crash of his computer keyboard followed it. Vanessa’s head appeared around the edge of the office door, a concerned look on her face, but Henry ignored it, engrossed as he was in his anger. He sat at his desk, glaring at the computer screen in front of him, his keyboard on the floor near the filing cabinets that lined the wall to the left of his desk. Several keys lay scattered across the hardwood floor. Vanessa crept into the room and approached his desk, leaning over to look him in the face. “What’s wrong?”
The Unnaturals (The Unnaturals Series Book 1) Page 21