by Larissa Ione
“Arrogant bastard,” she muttered, but there was no power behind the words. She wanted his blood, and truth be told, her treasonous body ached for everything he was so boldly offering.
She had to get out of there.
She flashed. Tried to flash. Her body flickered like a dying lightbulb. Oh, sweet Lord, she was stuck. If Kynan were to be attacked right now…
She had to do it. She had to take from Lore, if only to ensure Kynan’s safety. But the thought of drinking from him, of taking lifeblood from his powerful body… it was dangerous. What kind of emotions would stay with her if she drank from an incubus? Already, the very idea had her warming up all over, her thighs clenching and wetness blooming between her legs.
He tilted his head to the side. His muscular neck was exposed, his jugular pulsing strong and steady beneath tan skin.
Just a small taste. A sip. Enough to give her the strength to hunt down a proper host. Decision made, she mounted him, straddling his thighs. She scooted backward in an attempt to avoid intimate contact, but his wicked grin said he wasn’t going to play that way. He lifted his knees to shift her forward, and she nearly gasped at the feel of the hard ridge of his sex against hers.
Damn him. She refused to give him the satisfaction of a reaction, so she braced her hands on his shoulders and leaned in. His scent, earthy and bold, ignited a pleasurable hum inside her. Oh, how she needed this.
“It won’t hurt,” she whispered against his skin.
“Not worried about that,” he whispered back.
She told herself that touching him was necessary, that it meant nothing, told herself all kinds of lies as she dragged her tongue up his neck, right along the jugular. His body went taut beneath her, but with anticipation or dread, she didn’t know. She licked again, taking her time, even though she didn’t need to; her first stroke numbed the bite site. No, this second taste was for her, not him, and there was no lying about that.
“I’m starting to feel like a Tootsie Pop, here,” he rasped.
She couldn’t contain a smile. “Yes… how did that old commercial go?” She licked him. “One.” She licked him again, and he moaned. “Two.” She licked him once more, and his hips came off the bed.
“Three.”
* * *
Idess’s fangs slid into Lore’s throat so smoothly he felt only the slightest tingle, and then her mouth latched on.
Oh… yeah.
No one had ever bitten him before, but wow, this was amazing. He still wasn’t sure why he’d offered to play juice box, but he definitely didn’t regret it. Warmth flowed from her mouth through his body, loosening his muscles and his mind. He drifted in a happy place as she sucked on his neck, her tongue and lips caressing his skin so gently he almost asked her to suck harder, to give him even more to feel.
With the way the bed canopy bowed from his struggles, the chains had enough give in them to allow him to touch her if he strained. Stretching, he raked his fingers through the loose strands of her hair, marveling at the silky texture and curling waves. At his touch, she gave a little start, and then she sagged against him, putting them into full body contact.
It shouldn’t feel so good. She was his captor. If he didn’t get free, Sin would die. No amount of pleasure should be able to sway him, but Idess was pleasure in the flesh, and his incubus body could only respond.
And did it ever respond. Despite the earlier release, his cock was aching inside its leather prison, his balls were tight, and his skin burned all over.
God, he wished he could touch her, really touch her. He wanted to rip off her clothes, roll her onto her back, and drive into her until she screamed. He’d show her what it was like to be held captive, helpless to feel anything but what your captor wanted you to feel.
He’d torture her, all right. He’d take her to the edge of passion and hold her there until she was insane with the need to come. Only after she begged for it long enough and good enough, would he give it to her.
She was panting, and so was he, his body out of control. Lost in his own head, he hadn’t been aware that they were grinding against each other, having sex with their clothes on. “Touch me,” he said roughly.
Her fingers tightened on his shoulders, digging in with such sweet pain. It was damn good, but he wanted her fingers to take a leisurely slide south. Far south.
“Like that. But lower.”
Her fingers dug in even more, and he hissed. How was it possible to feel both relaxed and energized at the same time?
He cocked one leg up for leverage—and to put his erection more firmly against her. But even as she arched into him, a low moan dredged up from deep in her chest and her grip on his shoulders eased. Her teeth unplugged, and he felt the warm stroke of her tongue over the skin of his neck.
Strangely, she didn’t move off him. Instead, she laid her head down on his shoulder.
“Ah… this can’t be all there is to feeding, right? I mean, we got a little below the waist action going on…”
She didn’t move. Shit.
“Angel Cake?” He rattled his chains. “Idess!” Worried that she was injured or ill or that his demon blood was poison to an angel, he tugged on her hair.
And was rewarded with a tiny squeak… followed by a series of soft snores.
She’d fallen asleep. She’d taken nourishment from him, and then, like a contented kitten, she’d nuzzled against him and fallen asleep.
Something inside him shook so hard he was surprised Idess didn’t get jiggled right off him. This was the closest he’d ever been to a female. Oh, he’d fucked them, and he’d even cared for one he’d foolishly thought could be his. But never had any female fallen asleep on him. It was a surprising intimacy that gave him some hellacious warm fuzzies in a situation he had no right to feel good about at all.
And yet, he stroked her hair and tried to be still, because crazily, this was the most amazing thing that had ever happened to him.
Eight
Underworld General was the last place Sin wanted to be. But Lore was missing, and the fact that the chick who had interrupted Sin during her assassination attempt had tried to kill Sin with his dagger was a chilling sign that he was in trouble. The only upside was that the blade had tasted the female’s blood, which meant it wanted more.
Unfortunately, the Gargantua dagger had one serious limitation; it could only be used to track a victim during the devil’s hour in the time zone where the prey’s blood had been shed. So, since Sin had time to kill, she searched for Lore in all of the obvious places. She’d gone to the assassin den. Nothing. She’d stopped by his house. Nada. She’d called and texted and emailed. Not a goddamned thing.
Her last resort was UGH, where he might be a patient… or where he might be getting all chummy with his brothers. His brothers, because she refused to acknowledge them.
And why the thought that he might be hanging out with them made her horribly uncomfortable—jealous, even—she had no idea.
She stepped out of the Harrowgate and into what must be the emergency department. A male Umber looked up from the triage desk, his steel gray lips peeled back from white teeth.
“What do you want?”
Apparently, people skills weren’t necessary to work in a demon hospital. Sin approached him, limping from the wound she’d taken during the battle with the mystery chick. “Do you have a patient named Lore?”
The Umber sneered. “I’m not allowed to give out information on patients.”
Both relief and dread flooded her. “So he is a patient.”
“I didn’t say that,” the Umber said.
Sin slammed her fists down on the desk. “You ass.”
“Is there a problem here?” The deep voice froze her to the black stone floor. It wasn’t Lore’s, but the forbidding tone was the same. This would be one of the brothers. Crap-o-rama.
Slowly, she turned. Found herself looking at a sinister medical symbol on a scrub top covering a broad chest. Swallowing dryly, she dragged her gaze up, and
yup, this guy, with his short hair, I-own-this-hospital presence, and stern expression might not be the spitting image of Lore, but close enough. Plus, the dermoire that extended to his neck and connected to two rings around his throat—mate marks and maturity marks—sort of gave him away. Well, that, and his nametag. Eidolon.
Not good.
“The female is looking for Lore,” the Umber said, and inside, she cringed. This was the scenario she’d hoped to avoid.
Eidolon’s expression remained stony, and she suddenly wondered what it would take to rile him up. “How do you know Lore?”
“That’s none of your business.”
“Guess you don’t want to know if he’s a patient.” Eidolon swung around and headed toward a couple of curtained cubicles.
Cursing, Sin jogged to catch up. “I work with him.”
Eidolon stopped and eyed her with suspicion. “He’s not here.”
“You couldn’t have said that without all the drama?”
Eidolon didn’t have a chance to reply, because the sliding emergency room doors opened, and two medics guided in a stretcher—a stretcher laden with her warg victim. Holy shit.
One of the medics straddled the warg, pumping compressions into his chest. Eidolon sprang into action.
“What do we have?” he asked, moving alongside the medics. Sin kept pace despite her limp, but hung back to play fly-on-the-wall.
The medic pushing the stretcher, his flashing fangs giving away his vampire status, said in a clipped voice, “Warg. Found unconscious and not breathing. Our attempts to resuscitate him were successful, but we lost him three blocks out.”
He rattled off some vital statistics that Sin didn’t understand as they wheeled the stretcher into one of the curtained rooms. More medical staff swarmed inside. Sin waited just outside, listening to more medical-speak that didn’t sound good. Well, not good for the warg. Good for her.
After a few minutes, the medics exited. One took off through the doors, while the other, the blond vamp, paused outside to scratch notes on his clipboard.
Sin cleared her throat. “Hey, how is the warg?”
His eerie silver eyes shifted to hers, but he kept writing. “Dying. Why?”
“No reason.” She rubbed her arms through the sleeves of her denim jacket and fidgeted under his unnerving gaze. “What’s wrong with him? Was he in an accident? Is he sick with something?”
“You’re kind of nosy.”
You’re kind of hot. She shrugged. “Just a concerned citizen.” Yeah, concerned Eidolon would save the werewolf and she’d have to kill him again.
The vamp watched her for a moment, and the floor seemed to shift beneath her. He really was extraordinary. He was easily as tall as Lore, his shoulders as broad, but that was where the resemblance ended. Hot Vamp Medic had a lean, athletic build, chiseled cheekbones, and a full, sensual mouth that no doubt could latch on to a female’s most sensitive spots and make her whimper.
He scanned her from head to toe. “You should get your leg looked at.”
Frowning, she looked down at the spot of blood that had seeped through her jeans and the bandage she’d wrapped around her thigh. “It’s no big—”
He didn’t even wait for her to finish. He handed the clipboard to the Umber and exited through the doors he’d come through. He was a charmer, that one.
She’d have been irritated by his blatant dismissal if not for the fact that the warg she needed to die was being treated by her brother, who didn’t know she existed. Christ, only she could get herself into this kind of mess.
This had never happened before—a victim of hers surviving even minutes after being infected by her touch—and a horrifying thought stabbed at her brain; what if he’d infected someone else? While her heart had turned to brimstone decades ago, and for the most part she couldn’t care less about the lives and deaths of people she didn’t even know, she didn’t kill for fun. When she killed, it was deliberate and quick. Controlled. Killing was the only thing she had any command over, the only aspect of her life that wasn’t chaotic, and she couldn’t stand the thought that she might be responsible for deaths she couldn’t prevent or make happen the way they should.
She paced, hanging back near the Harrowgate where the Umber wouldn’t notice her but she could keep an eye on the room. It was weird, being in the hospital her brothers had built. She hadn’t known what to expect, but disarray and unprofessionalism wasn’t it. The staff was grumpy, and when a patient came in with a spear impaled in his gut, two doctors spent so much time fighting over who got to treat the guy that he collapsed while the doctors screamed at each other.
She’d seen more order in a bar brawl.
“What the hell is going on?” Eidolon stepped out of the warg’s room, his gold-glowing eyes fixed on the guy bleeding out on the floor. His fury seemed to knock some sense into the arguing doctors, but as Eidolon rushed toward the patient, his expression told Sin that those physicians were soon going to wish their parents had practiced birth control.
But hey, the commotion made for a great distraction, and Sin could turn any situation into one that benefited her.
While all attention was on the skewered-guy drama, Sin peeked into the warg’s room. Relief flooded her at the sight of a sheet draped over a body. Now, if she could just gather her proof of death and get out of there so she could find Lore…
Of course, she couldn’t very well get proof while the body was lying in the middle of the emergency department. She’d have to wait until they took him to the morgue. In the meantime, she needed privacy.
Making sure no one was watching, she slipped down one of the halls and into a room full of medical equipment, wicked-looking, odd restraints, and even odder homey touches, like a wooden dresser and shelves stocked with towels and slippers in various sizes and shapes.
Sin removed her jacket, sat on the edge of the bed, and waited. She didn’t have to wait long. A vibration started deep in her body, growing steadily until it concentrated in her right arm. Her dermoire writhed, tightened, and finally, the skin between two symbols split, and a deep gash appeared in her biceps.
Even clenching her teeth so tightly her jaw popped, she couldn’t contain a cry of pain. Blood spurted, but she didn’t bother to stop it. No, this was a cleansing of sorts, something that happened after every kill, as though her body was purging itself of the guilt she couldn’t allow herself to feel.
“What the fuck?” Eidolon rushed into the room, grabbed her wrist, and slapped his hand over the gash.
“Don’t touch me!” She wheeled away from him, but he moved like Lore, with incredible speed and grace, and in a heartbeat he had her back on the bed, arm stretched out, with one palm putting pressure on her biceps.
His dermoire lit up. She kneed him in the junk, and with an “oof!” he doubled over, his grip loosening enough to allow her to leap away, scoop up her jacket, and dart toward the door.
He tackled her before she made it.
She smacked the floor hard, her breath exploding from her lungs. Eidolon rolled her, straddled her, and pinned her wrists together on her chest. Then he stared down at her with that furious, golden-eyed glare Lore had perfected.
“You want to explain those?” His gaze cut to the markings on her right arm. “And how you got around the Haven spell?”
“Haven spell? Get the fuck off me and I’ll leave you alone.”
He kept her wrists pinned with one hand and used the other to tear away her tank top’s shoulder strap, revealing her dermoire all the way to her neck. “You had this applied. How? Magic?” He rubbed his thumb over one of the symbols. “Permanent ink? Tattoo?”
“Fuck you.” Pain streaked up her arm from the tear in her biceps, which was gaping open from the awkward grip he had her arm in, and blood was pooling on the floor next to her.
She wriggled, but he held her tighter, squeezed her more firmly between his thighs even as he slapped his palm over the laceration and applied pressure. “The top symbol is my father’
s. Were you mated to him? To Khane?”
Mated? To a Seminus demon? Eew. Still, she put on her best honest expression. “Yes. Love those hot, sexalicious Seminus males.”
He narrowed his eyes at her. “You’re lying. Wrong arm for mate marks.”
“If you already knew the answer, why’d you ask?”
He went on as though she hadn’t spoken. “Unless… you could be bonded to Lore, since the markings are the same. With his human genes, the bond could have gone funky.”
“Yep,” she said, feeling nauseated at the mere thought of being bonded in any way other than birth to Lore. “We were wondering what happened with that.”
His gaze cut sharply to hers, and in the long, tense silence, they stared at each other. It was weird, looking at the complete stranger who was her brother, as he tried to puzzle together both the obvious and the impossible.
Blood pumped from her wound in a warm rush between his fingers, and his dermoire lit up.
“No!” she snapped. “Don’t heal it. It’s mine to deal with.”
Ignoring her, he slid his fingers into the wound. She rocked her head up and bit him in the biceps.
“Ow!” He jerked his hand away. “Damn you. At least let me stitch it.”
“I’ve hit you, kneed you, bitten you… and all you can think about is fixing a scratch?”
“It’s more than a scratch, and I am a doctor. So, go figure, I’ve got this crazy desire to help people.” Warily, he released her. “You going to play nice so I can close that wound?” He scanned her body. “And the one on your leg?”
Shit. This had gotten way out of hand. She could promise to play nice and try to escape again, but she had a feeling she’d end up in the same situation she was currently in. And he wasn’t going to let the dermoire thing go. The fire in his eyes made that clear enough.
Damn you, Lore. You just had to find these guys, didn’t you?
“Fine,” she growled. “But don’t you dare use that stupid healing thingie Lore says you do. I want stitches. On my arm. You can zap the leg scratch.”