by L. D. Rose
“I had no control.” Blaze tried to keep his voice low and restrained but he was bursting with self-loathing. “I never ever wanted to hurt anyone. I tried to starve myself, I tried to stop. God, Val, I tried to die. This fucking thing inside me wouldn’t let me! And Cyrus knew it. He fucking knew it and he used it against me.”
Blaze became aware of his grip on the doorjamb when it cracked beneath his hands. Heat rolled off him in searing waves, his blood roaring in his ears, his fractured heart slamming in his chest. All signs that nothing good would come of this if he didn’t calm down.
“You have no idea what they did to me.” His voice shook with the effort to compose himself. “And I’ll make sure you’ll never know, that you’ll never go through anything like that for as long as you live.”
“That’s no excuse,” she retaliated, her anger so potent it was tangible, like green fire through the red miasma of his self-hate. He knew all she thought of was her sister, an innocent child who’d died at the hands of the likes of him. “You had no right! No matter what they did to you, you had no right.”
Her words sliced through him, cutting him deeply, finally splitting his heart in half. Cursing, he pushed off the doorframe, turning away from her as he paced the short distance across the hall. He felt her gun trained on him, drilling a hole into his back. The garbage of his past was strewn everywhere now, the horrors exhumed from the cemetery of his nasty history, reopening old, festering wounds that had never really healed.
Every single word she’d spoken was true and what he’d been fighting with since he was freed from that pit beneath the earth. What he’d done was unforgivable and he paid for it daily. He could never make up for it, no matter how many lives he saved or what penance he offered. He could never repair the damage or pay back that debt of life. Their ghosts would forever haunt him. When he slept, when he woke, fucked, fed.
When he killed.
And he would take them to his own grave, just like he’d taken them to theirs.
Blaze whipped back around to face Valerie, yanking off his sunglasses and closing the distance between them. The heartrending combination of panic and fear glimmered in her eyes as she gritted her teeth, finger hovering over the trigger. He impulsively reached out and lifted the barrel, aiming it right between his eyes before he dropped his hand away.
“If you’re going to do it,” the words clogged in his throat but he managed to spit them out, “do it right.”
A fresh wave of emotion—God, he could almost taste it—crashed over her, wrenching a painful sob from her throat. She visibly steeled herself, bringing her hands together so they both gripped the gun. But even with the added stability, she shook harder, knuckles white, sweat popping on her brow as tears soaked her cami and dripped onto the carpeted floor. She bit her lower lip hard to keep it from quivering and he prayed she didn’t bleed.
Because that thing, that monster inside him, rapidly rose to the surface, like a shark in the ocean of her tears, recognizing danger and willing to do anything to stop it.
“Do it!” he roared, making her flinch. Something broke inside him as he leaned into the muzzle, the cool metal trembling against his forehead, unable to tear his eyes off her for the life of him. “I’ve done worse things, Val, worse than I did to that boy. I’m a monster. I deserve this no less than any other leech.”
She inched back, wavering, the barrel leaving his hot skin. Fury filled her sodden eyes even as a powerful mix of panic, fear, hesitation, and something he dared not name, pumped out of her sweating pores in potent jasmine waves.
His gums tightened, his fangs sliding into place, alarms blaring in his skull as the darkness inside him yawned.
“God damn it, pull the trigger.”
“I can’t!” she wailed, her despondent expression branding into his brain before she slammed the door in his face.
Her back hit the wood on the other side. Cries of anguish tore from her chest, years of stored-up emotion erupting from the volcano inside her. Every gut-wrenching keen slashed through him, rattling his bones and bringing him to his knees. Though the door stood between them, he knew when she slid to the floor, and he went down with her, bowing his head, resting it against the frame.
Trying to catch his breath, Blaze closed his eyes as a single tear escaped him, falling to the carpet. “I’m sorry,” he whispered before he said the three words he’d wanted to say the moment he saw her face again. “I love you.”
He pushed the gloved heels of his palms into his eyes, wiping away the moisture. Valerie continued to cry, and he let her, for there was nothing he could do to stop it. She didn’t have the courage to kill him, but it didn’t mean she wouldn’t regain it. It didn’t mean she wouldn’t track him down later and finish the job.
And when she did, he would be waiting for her.
“Hey,” a gruff masculine voice said. “What’s going on here?”
Blaze slipped on his sunglasses before he looked at the middle-aged man standing a few doors down the hall. With wariness on his weathered face, the man half stood in his apartment, holding a twelve-gauge shotgun at his side. Blaze scanned the corridor to find many more faces peering out at him from their doors, an audience watching him with the same guarded concern, the same hint of fear. He climbed to his feet, swaying a little and saying nothing, his mouth still full of fangs.
Then he turned away and walked out, doors frantically slamming shut as he passed them. The red exit sign glared at him as he collided with the door’s push bar and met the brilliant light of the sun.
He staggered a few steps before he came to a halt, standing on the fresh-cut grass, unsure of what to do or where to go. Nerves fried to hell, he removed a cigarette from the pack in his cargo pocket and nearly dropped it, twice. His fangs finally retracted when he managed to light the butt, taking a deep, lung-choking drag.
As the nicotine hit him, he moved out, struggling to clear his mind, trying to wipe the image of the barrel in his face, to think of anything else beyond Valerie’s pain. But her despair still echoed through the brick building and inside his skull.
As he strode down the walkway beside the complex, he saw a woman in a burqa sitting on a nearby bench, reading a book. She ignored him as he passed her, and he vaguely wondered how crazy she was to wear that garment in this heat, but the thought was soon lost in the noise of his head. He didn’t hear her set the book down and climb to her feet, silent as a cat. He didn’t hear her creep up behind him as he rounded the bend toward the parking lot.
He didn’t hear the rustle of cloth when she leapt onto his back, knocking the cigarette from his lips as she clamped a hand over his mouth and stabbed him in the throat with a needle.
Blaze barely had time to register the vampiric scent of incense before his body went numb, crumpling to the ground like a wet noodle. She went down with him, keeping her iron hold secure as she emptied the contents of the syringe into his jugular.
“Men,” the dark, feminine voice murmured in his ear, her Syrian accent freezing the blood in his veins. “Always making the same fucking mistakes.”
She squirmed out from beneath his limp body and stood, looming over him as she pulled down her veil. Nabila. She glowed like a human, showing him that she’d just fed as she reached for his sunglasses and removed them. Although he was completely conscious, Blaze couldn’t move, every muscle in his body paralyzed. Breathing and swallowing became more and more difficult, inducing horrific flashbacks of being underground and at her mercy. Panic lashed at him as her lips curved malevolently, flashing a pair of wicked bloodstained fangs.
“Bungarotoxin,” she purred, answering the question in his progressively drooping eyes. She ran a slender finger over his numb lips, injecting him with hate and revulsion. “Krait venom. Specially made just for you.”
Blaze’s vision blurred, seeing double as Nabila replaced her ve
il. She took his car keys from his cargo pocket and dangled them in front of his face mockingly. He roared against the anesthetized cage of his body, fury exploding through him like a silent fireworks show, all of it going unheard.
With some difficulty, she lifted him up and hauled him over her shoulder as the world spun, the sky on the grass, the grass on the sky.
“You’ve put on some weight.” She snickered as she carried him to the Jeep. He watched her burqa flap behind her, praying that someone noticed—anybody—but they ran into no one. Sending him on another dizzying spin, she tossed him in the backseat, his head smacking hard against the opposite door. She climbed into the driver’s seat and started the Wrangler, wasting no time as she quickly pulled out of the parking lot and hit the street.
At least they moved away from Valerie. At least she would be safe, for now, under the protection of her neighbors.
“Enjoy the ride, firestarter,” Nabila said triumphantly as she turned up the music, Notorious B.I.G. blaring over the speakers. “Because it’ll be your last.”
And as Blaze stared hopelessly up at the black hardtop, he believed her.
NINETEEN
Valerie didn’t know how long she lay there, propped against the door in a pool of misery.
She must’ve fallen asleep because she opened her eyes to her fully dark living room, carpet chafing against her cheek. She’d curled up in a ball, still clutching her gun like a lifeline. Her arms tingled as she lifted her Beretta and released the clip, snapping the slide and popping the bullet from the chamber. The silver-jacketed hollow point hit the carpet with a dull thud and rolled away from her, glinting briefly in the darkness.
She couldn’t kill him.
The VCR’s digital readout glared at her in objection, but she didn’t have it in her to pull the trigger. Not when he’d stood there, practically begging her to blow him away, as if he’d rather die at her hands than anyone else’s.
The emotion on his face had been too much, far too much for the ruthless killer she’d seen on that tape. And when he’d exposed those opalescent eyes he hated so much, he’d shown her exactly how human he was. The pain there had been unfathomable—the remorse, the self-loathing, the despair—all of it shattering her will to pieces and leaving her heart bleeding for him. His words reverberated through her.
I tried to die.
And the honesty in them had been so real, so raw, so sharp, like the edge of a blade that cut deep through the turbulent layers of her anger.
And after she’d sat here and cried for what seemed like hours, she remembered the man who grieved over a former lover and a homeless friend, who rescued a young girl from a leech’s clutches, who threw himself into a living hell to stop a monster from ever hurting another person again.
She remembered the man who protected her so fiercely, who barely let her out of his sight when they were together. Who made love to her like she was the center of his world.
The animal on that tape was no longer here. The man—no, hybrid—she now knew was human in every way that mattered.
And, God help her, she loved him.
Her bleary eyes scanned the darkness as she lay there, gun and magazine held limply in her hands. The encompassing silence only amplified the thoughts running rampant through her head. Dark shadows took shape against the wall of her mind, ghosts whispering against her skull, and she didn’t have the strength to fight them off any longer.
Cold wind swept through the room, making her shiver. The gauzy white curtains whipped the air as she came awake, drawing her comforter up to her throat. When a dry leaf scraped against her face, her eyes snapped open, panic squeezing her belly like a vise.
The window was open.
Valerie sat up, looking across the room to find Elise’s twin bed empty. The baby pink sheets and white down comforter were tousled in a way that indicated her sister had crawled out of bed of her own accord.
Even at the tender age of ten, Valerie knew how to read a crime scene.
She leapt out of bed, her heart thumping in her narrow chest, the sunlight bright and welcoming despite the autumn chill. The window had been pulled up just enough for Elise to sneak outside, enough to show Valerie that no adult had entered here.
That no vampire had entered here.
Wearing her violet pajamas with her long blond hair astray, Valerie climbed out of the window in an attempt to retrace her sister’s footsteps. She should’ve run to tell her mother and father, but she wanted to find Elise first, just in case her sister played outside, safe and sound in the morning light. Valerie didn’t want to get her sister in trouble, just as Elise would’ve done for her.
She hopped over her mother’s sacred flowerbeds and landed on the still-green grass, her bare feet sinking into the soft soil. The wind tossed her hair and brushed her cheeks, lifting the dead leaves from the nearby maple tree and spinning them into small eddies. She scanned the rolling expanse of the backyard, dappled with brightly colored trees and a thriving lawn in the small Hudson village of Irvington. She didn’t see Elise anywhere and the vise grip on her belly tightened another notch.
She took a few steps forward, and when she stepped on something wet, she looked down to find blood streaked across her feet.
Horror bloomed inside her, a horror unlike anything she’d ever felt as she stared at the gleaming, bloodied blades of grass in the saturated patch where she stood. A jagged trail led toward the back of the cottage, the grass bent and flattened in places.
There’d been a struggle.
Even then, Valerie didn’t call for her parents, didn’t scream like most girls her age would. She simply followed the macabre trail, unable to snap out of her terrified, surreal trance.
Faster and faster, now breaking into a run. The trail grew bloodier, nastier, painting her feet crimson.
She nearly ran right over her sister’s body.
Seeing Elise’s pale, twisted leg, Valerie skidded to a halt and slipped on the soiled grass, landing hard on her butt. The pain didn’t register, for she felt nothing but that bottomless terror as she stared at her eight-year-old sister’s mangled body. Elise’s nightgown had been ripped apart, strips of red-stained white cotton used to bind and gag her. Her hair—God, her beautiful dark hair—was wrapped tightly around her throat, as if it had been used to strangle her. Her olive skin was gray with the pallor of death, her body drained of its once vibrant life, the vulnerable parts of her torn to brutal shreds like raw meat.
Then, finally, Valerie screamed. She screamed until her parents came, screamed until she could scream no more, feeling something crack, break, and die inside her.
Valerie blinked back fresh tears, not allowing herself to cry in fear that this time she wouldn’t stop. She let out a shaky breath as she closed her eyes, trying to pull herself together. Phantoms hovered at the periphery so she opened her eyes again before any more horrific memories escaped the dark confines of her mind.
She needed to get up. Now.
As if on cue, her cell phone rang, a piercing shrill in the silence. She sat up, her body protesting with the aches of being locked in a position for too long. She blindly reached for the cell on the end table beside the door and read the caller ID. She didn’t recognize the number but she answered it anyway, clearing the lump in her throat.
“Hello?” She sounded awful, even to her own ears.
“Valerie? It’s Dax.”
Dax? “How did you get my number—”
“Never mind that. Is Blaze with you?”
Blaze. Her chest tightened at the sound of his name. “No.” She shoved a hand through her hair, pulling the sticking strands away from her face. The aching image of his expression before she slammed the door flashed through her mind. “He left.”
“When?” Concern saturated Dax’s voice. Concern and something close to f
ear.
“I don’t know, hours ago, I think. A little before noontime, maybe.”
He let out a curse, sending a jolt of panic through her. “Did he tell you where he was going?”
“No.” Dread pooled in her gut and solidified like concrete. “Dax, what’s going on? What’s wrong?”
“We’ve been trying to reach him all day.” She heard him shuffling around, keys jangling, male voices resonating in the background. “He’s gone AWOL before but we thought he was with you. If he isn’t . . .” Dax trailed off, the implication obvious. “We need to find him. I’m coming to get you.”
Valerie’s heart was in her throat, her blood running cold. “You said he’s done this before, right? So he might be fine, right?”
“Right,” Dax replied, but the reassurance wasn’t convincing. “Don’t worry. I’ll be there in a bit.”
He hung up and Valerie immediately dialed Blaze’s number. The line rang and rang before it went to voicemail, a mechanical female voice instructing her to leave a message. She called again, three times, knowing he wouldn’t pick up, but the foolish hope inside her wouldn’t let go. And the more she called, the more that hope faded, turning into a gut-wrenching, heart-pounding fear.
When she finally gave up, his words echoed through her mind, sending icy fingertips walking down her spine.
I’m a monster. I deserve this no less than any other leech.
And she prayed that he didn’t take matters into his own hands and succeed where she had failed.