Hunger

by Barbara J. Hancock

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Her heart adjusted to match his. There wasn’t any pain or pinch or pause in its beats. More like a gentle sigh, it simply whooshed along with his with effortless ease.

  Suddenly, she could take a deep, pine-scented breath and her lungs filled more deeply because he was there. Suddenly, her heart fit in her chest and pumped with a steady, perfect rhythm because he was there. Suddenly, she wasn’t the awkward college student turned reluctant vampire who starved and pined and ached. She was the most desired woman in the universe who starved and pined and ached because he was there.

  Dillon held her against the cool stone with the lean weight of his body and cupped her face with his hands. She didn’t flinch away. He breathed her name and she enjoyed the sound of worship for her on his lips. Sure, it was weak. It was dangerous. But she needed a reprieve.

  The queen was dead.

  Her mom was going to be okay.

  And Winters still had his hands full with zombies.

  She closed her eyes and allowed Dillon to hold her. If he tried for a kiss, she’d stop him. If he tried to bite her, she’d hand him his teeth in a jar. But as long as he only held her…she would be held…for just a little while.

  “You killed her.” Even a quiet and sexy whisper could sound jubilant.

  “Yes.” Holly didn’t want to talk. She wished the world had a pause button. She needed to breathe deeply in her Maker’s arms and rest for a moment because the worst was yet to come.

  “She’s gone,” Dillon said, and he spoke into her hair where he suddenly pressed his face.

  “Yes.” Pause. Please, just pause. She didn’t want to face what was coming.

  “Holly?” Dillon must know she was thinking of Winters. He called for her attention. “I’m free.”

  She opened her eyes to be sure she understood the tone of his voice. She gulped when his eyes glittered in the moonlight. Dillon was nobody’s pause. He wasn’t reformed and ready to accept his freedom with peace and dignity. He sounded like a pirate pulling into port for the first time after an endless voyage and he had pillage in his eyes. He also had her full, undivided attention.

  “I saw you and it woke me up, but the queen was in the way. Last night you freed me from chains, but tonight you freed my soul. Let me repay you.”

  He wasn’t talking about pirate gold. He had plundering on his mind and he wanted her to join him. He no longer answered to anyone. Though the queen had been mad, Holly didn’t like the idea of Dillon as a rogue vampire with no one tying him down. Still, she couldn’t kill him. There was wickedness in his eyes, but there was also sanity. And tenderness? And love?

  “Don’t say no, darlin’. Just let me remember this look on your face. You destroyed over fifty vampires with your bare hands and their powerful queen and you’re afraid to kiss me…because you’re afraid you’ll like it…because you do like it.”

  Dillon laughed again and kissed her anyway. Of all the times he’d touched her lips this was different. He was asking, not demanding. He was playful, but he wasn’t toying with her. He was wooing her, courting her, in the only way he knew how. He was completely, fully Dillon.

  And Holly’s hands hovered over his shoulders for one second, then two, then three, before she used them to push him away.

  “Oh, darlin’. You as a willing lover would be a heady draught, sure enough.”

  Sane or not, she should kill him. He had ruined her life and destroyed her family. Her father and sister were dead because of him. She and her mother were forever changed. As she fisted her hands, shades of gray misted behind her eyes.

  He had been a man once. The queen had taken away his humanity. She had used him like a deadly puppet. She had pulled his strings and so many had died. Holly wanted the chance to prove she wasn’t a monster. Didn’t Dillon deserve that chance too?

  Her hands relaxed and his mouth lifted in a familiar, but very different, smile.

  “He doesn’t deserve your love, you know. Anyone who would have it and discard it deserves to die.” His smile turned predatory and Holly fisted her hands again.

  “No.” Her tone was definite. There would be no shades of gray allowed in this.

  “I’ll kill him if he hurts you.” Dillon was just as definite, soft and deadly.

  “I can take care of myself.”

  “That’s a proven fact, love. You’re stronger than anyone—man, woman or monster—I’ve ever met.” He stepped closer and Holly tilted her chin to meet his gaze. She wouldn’t be a coward. She wouldn’t fear her reaction to him anymore. She had been through too much with more to come. There would be no pause. She didn’t have time to play.

  “The answer will always be no.” The words were an echo of a former promise, but they were more firm than before because now she knew they were true.

  She didn’t have Winters, but she didn’t want Dillon. His way would not be her way. She wouldn’t go there…ever. The queen had lost her sanity, but Holly would hold on to hers and hold and hold. Without Winters, without Dillon, even without her mother if it came to that.

  Dillon’s lips quirked sideways into a wicked smile. He saw her resolve. He knew she meant it. And he didn’t seem to care.

  “Since when did I take no for an answer, darlin’?”

  He leaned in lazily, confidently, to take another kiss…and Holly’s hand clamped around his throat.

  His eyes widened and his smile slipped and Holly tightened her fingers.

  “My heart might beat for you. My lungs might fill for you. You might be a handsome, wicked devil, but the answer is no.”

  He was older, more experienced and powerful. And her conflicted feelings for him had sent mixed signals she couldn’t afford to send. She pushed him back again and he went. His body left hers. His arms reluctantly slipped away. So what if she was suddenly cold? Warmth was highly overrated and bereft she could get used to.

  “You might need me…against him,” Dillon persuaded, his hands up as if she held him at gunpoint with two six shooters at the ready.

  “I’d rather die,” she assured him. It pained him. She could tell. In his mind, Juliet had tossed Romeo over for a guy named Smith. Still, it was right and good to push him away. She was a monster in some ways. There was no denying it. But she would be a monster in her own way. Not in his.

  He stood tall in the moonlight, rejected, but never, ever worthy of rejection. He was impossibly handsome. He was playfully wicked. He had depths, pain and loss and longing and hope, she’d only begun to fathom. And, he loved her. But, she didn’t love him. Heaven help the woman who ever did fall in love with him. How could you love passion and pain incarnate?

  “Another time. Another place. Another century. He won’t live forever.” It was a proclamation of sorts, but Dillon’s sexy drawl made it like foreplay, an intimate promise he fully intended to keep.

  “Forever is a long time,” Holly replied. She was very happy when she managed not choke on the words, struck as she was by the heat pouring off of him in waves.

  “I reckon you’re too young to even imagine how long, but I meant it when I said it…forever.”

  And she felt the kiss she hadn’t allowed brush against her lips.

  It wasn’t real, but it burned. It wasn’t invited, but it pleasured. He laughed at her surprise and tapped his forehead at someone over her shoulder before he flashed away into the night.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  It was Winters.

  Her heart clenched as it tried to recover from Dillon’s disappearance and Winters’ reappearance all at the same time.

  He was a mess.

  Blood, ash and graveyard dirt smeared his skin and clothes and face. His knife dripped black gore on the ground. The hem of his coat was dark, sodden and it dripped too. How many vampires had he killed?

  Holly shuddered and almost took a step or two or ten away from him. She stopped herself. She hadn’t run from the queen. She hadn’t run from Dillon. She wouldn’t run from this. Of course, it was
much, much harder to face someone who wanted to hurt you if you loved them with all of your heart.

  “No kisses this time?” It was lightly said, but not lightly meant. His eyes were darker than she’d ever seen them. They gleamed blackly in the moonlight.

  Holly decided not to tell him about the ghost kiss Dillon had stolen. He didn’t look like he was in the mood for that kind of revelation. In fact, he looked like his mood was full to bursting with plenty of dark, murderous thoughts without adding to them.

  “No more,” she replied and it was true.

  “But no pile of this-was-my-Maker ash either?” As he asked, he looked this way and that as if he hadn’t seen Dillon fly away, whole and unharmed.

  “He wasn’t like the others. He wasn’t a zombie thing,” Holly defended her decision to let Dillon go.

  “No. He was sane. He chose to kill and to make. And you let him live.” His eyes were dark because he was angry. A chill of adrenaline tickled down her spine.

  “He deserves a chance now that the queen is dead,” Holly spoke quickly, desperately trying to reach beyond the anger of the hunter to whatever was left of the man beneath.

  “A chance to what? Win you over? A chance to—”

  “That’s never going to happen,” she interrupted before he could cut to the heart of whatever had been between her and her Maker.

  “Last night it looked well on its way. When you enjoyed his kiss. That didn’t look like never. It didn’t look like no.” His words were clipped and his eyes flashed.

  “You were there?” Holly thought about last night and her cheeks began to burn.

  “I saw you.” In the dark, with Dillon, she’d faced her greatest weakness and her moment of greatest temptation and Winters had seen her.

  “Then you saw me leave. You saw me run.” Thank God, she had run. Even not knowing she had an audience, she’d done the right thing. He wasn’t impressed.

  “No, I saw you kiss him without a struggle. I saw you in his arms.” Those few words painted a picture and Holly closed her eyes against what it must have looked like to him.

  “And then I ran,” she said, wanting him to believe her.

  “From what? From him or from the way he made you feel?” Even without Dillon’s vampire eyes, Winters had seen so much. Suddenly, Holly was angry.

  “Both. It isn’t an easy transition. I was a woman and then I was a monster. I was surrounded by people who loved me and then I…wasn’t. I was with you and you were warm and strong and you…walked away.”

  Winters was dancing with her and it wasn’t the kind of dance that went with candlelight and champagne. It wasn’t romantic. It was deadly. With the same kind of grace she’d seen earlier in the night, he came toward her in a smooth, muscled glide.

  He smiled and it didn’t reach his eyes.

  Here was the stranger she’d traveled with through the swamp. The hunter, the killer, the cop on crusade, only now his blade and his coat dripped black on the ground. How many had he killed? She thought she saw the answer in his clenched jaw and his taut cheeks. Too many. Too many to stop now.

  Holly did back away then. It would have been false courage not to and stupid besides. He approached and she retreated, step for step for step. Just as she had with Dillon in the church. It was a tango without the beat of the drum and definitely without the rose.

  “What’s the matter, Holly. Don’t you trust me?” There was a hint of seductive tease in his voice, but it didn’t suit the moment. Dillon played. Winters didn’t. He was deadly serious. The tease was only his way of mimicking her Maker. It made her icy veins go colder still. “You let Dillon get closer to you than this,” he continued.

  “Dillon wasn’t dripping blood.”

  “No, he doesn’t waste a drop does he?” Winters came closer.

  “Not often.” She had no more room to step away from him. Her mother’s prone and peaceful form was inches from her heels. She was glad her mother couldn’t see the look in Winters’ eyes.

  “Oh, right, I seem to remember a living room splattered with blood.” He was less than a foot away from her.

  No, he definitely wasn’t playing. He wanted to hurt, to wound, before he killed. Why? Because of last night. Because he had seen her kiss Dillon. And even though she hadn’t succumbed to Dillon’s seduction, she hadn’t stopped that kiss when she should have.

  Where was the man who had washed her hair? Where was the man who had shared everything with her, no holds barred? Had that moment of weakness with Dillon driven that man back so deep beneath the vampire-hunter exterior that she’d never see the real Jarvis Winters again?

  To his credit, his lips did tighten as if even he didn’t like the words they’d uttered.

  “I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that,” Holly replied. Her teeth were clenched against a harsher reply. She didn’t want to lash back. She still wanted to believe they had something between them to salvage.

  “Should I pretend I didn’t see you kissing Dillon last night?”

  Winters had already doubted and damned and walked away from her. Seeing her with Dillon like that must have been the last straw. He must have thought she had betrayed him.

  And maybe, just a little, she had.

  “I ran away,” she reminded him.

  “Not before the kiss.”

  “Afterwards.”

  His blade quivered and she practically heard the movement whisper, “Wrong answer.”

  “I don’t love him.”

  The blade froze. Winters stopped his slow, stalking movement in her direction. She watched a small puddle form near his feet as his coat continued to drip. Better to watch the puddle than meet his eyes. The lover was gone and the hunter didn’t care who she loved. Or did he?

  “Vampires can’t love.”

  “You’re wrong. You’ve been wrong about it from the start. I’m a vampire and I do love. I love my mom. And I love you.”

  “You can’t.”

  “I shouldn’t, but I do. I can’t change it. Even though it would have been smarter to fly off into the night with the vampire freak who loves me back. I can’t change that it’s you I want to be with.”

  The night around them was quiet again, as silent as it had been when they’d walked through the flooded woods. After the mad frenzy of the battle, the silence was surreal. Holly had wanted a pause button to keep this moment at bay, but now that it was here she knew it was the world that had stopped. The world held its breath to see what would happen between the vampire and the vampire hunter.

  She wanted to reach out to her lover, to call back to life the man who had held her and saved her and tasted her skin.

  She didn’t know how.

  He was colder even than he had been the first moment they’d met. His jaw was set. His knife held, steady and sure. He didn’t look like the moment was hard on him. He looked like it was business as usual. While the world watched, Winters looked ready to kill her, to kill her mother.

  Holly knew it couldn’t be so.

  Even with blood dripping from his coat, even with his blade held at the ready, even with ash on his lips…he was the man she loved.

  He hadn’t stabbed her in the loft. He had kissed her. He had shared his blood. He had brought her back from the brink of death with warmth and kisses and a smile. And he had bought her a dozen bottles of strawberry shampoo.

  Candlelight and roses meant nothing at all when compared to all of that.

  Winters loved her.

  She just didn’t know if he loved her enough.

  “I don’t know if I can save her, but I have to try.”

  They both knew she wasn’t only talking about her mother. Not giving up on her mom was the same as not giving up on herself and it was the same as not giving up on Winters and what they could have together. It was a dark world. She couldn’t deny it. But it didn’t have to be a world without hope. It didn’t have to be a world without love.

  She saw the tightness around his eyes soften. If she was immortal a
nd if she did live a forever’s worth of days to come, there would never be a more shining moment than this moment when Winters softened around the eyes.

  He was the dedicated hunter and he still softened, just for her, just for one second. Because he loved her.

  He meant to fulfill his duty and kill all the monsters he could before they preyed on the innocent, and he still softened, just for her, just for one second, because he loved her.

  Holly knew.

  And in that second she found her pause.

  They stood and his eyes were warm, molten copper for her. They stood and she felt every kiss they’d ever shared and every embrace. Gone was even the slightest memory of Dillon’s touch. Her senses, her incredible senses, were full of nothing but the man in front of her.

  The steady beat of his heart, the slight spice on his skin, the rumpled hair on his brow, the bittersweet conviction of his cause…

  She breathed it all in and knew she wouldn’t trade the impossible, complicated, passionate conflict she shared with Winters for any perfect, made-for-each-other relationship with Dillon or anyone else.

  She needed Winters and he needed her. She needed someone to make sure she never ended up like the queen and he needed someone to be sure that the deepest heart of the man inside the hunter didn’t disappear buried beneath the ash and blood and death.

  The pause didn’t last. She wanted five minutes, ten, an eternity. She got a few moments at best.

  “It won’t change what I have to do.” He hovered between man and hunter and Holly wondered which he would choose.

  “It could change everything if you’d let it.” She was sure enough for both of them.

  “You sound like Dillon.” She was like her Maker in many ways, but in many other ways she wasn’t. She could persuade. She could seduce, but she hoped it was with light instead of darkness.

  “I know,” she admitted. She hoped it didn’t turn into a deathbed confession.

  “She still has to die.”

  Dillon was gone and his touch had gone with him. Her mother groaned and pushed her torso up from the ground. Holly knew her mom. She knew she wasn’t too far gone. She could see the light of returning reason in her eyes. Winters couldn’t see it. He saw the swaying, the dried blood, the confusion and the softness around his eyes disappeared.