Mortal Sentry (Raina Kirkland Book 2)

by Diana Graves

  BLACK DIAMOND, WA

  AN HOUR AGO Damon and I were running hard through a cemetery with a horde of ghouls on our tail. We’d killed the necromancer that was controlling them, forcing them to sneak into the homes of her enemies and steal their children. She ordered the ghouls to play with their food; to spread their gooey insides throughout the forest surrounding the small town of Black Diamond, Washington. We thought killing her would make the ghouls act more like ghouls. Ghouls don’t usually bother anybody, so long as you don’t make it a practice to sleep in cemeteries. They hide during the day and eat corpses at night, never leaving their grave yard or being much of a bother to anybody at all, save for maybe the grounds keeper. However, these ghouls didn’t return to their meek-ish dark existence. They roamed the town at night and attacked out in the open, dragging people to their gory deaths kicking and screaming.

  Damon and I were hunting them one by one, burning them, because that’s the only way to kill a ghoul. But, soon we realized the ghouls were hunting us, and there were more of them than I could shake a flame at, so we ran. Over the past year, Alistair taught me how to focus my fire, so that it would only come out of my hands if I wanted it to, instead of leaving me buck naked every damn time I used it. But, with that horde I couldn’t get them all with a focused spray of fire. I had to use my whole body as a Goddess damned torch! I told Damon to run on and I stopped where I stood. Damon trusted me, he didn’t ask questions or stop running, and when the ghouls caught up with me, he was a good distance away. I flamed up, pushing white hot flames out in every direction, creating a ten foot radius around me of instant-death, but I wasn’t fast enough. One ghoul bit into my thigh just as the fire exploded from my body. The ghoul was ashes at my feet, but I was left with a chunk of flesh missing from my leg.

  “Hold still,” Damon said softly as he cleaned my wound. It would be healed by morning or midday tomorrow, but Damon wanted it cleaned and bandaged for now.

  I bit my bottom lip as he gingerly poured alcohol over my thigh. I was sitting on the counter in our hotel bathroom, with Damon standing between my legs so he could block my view of the bite. I only got a glimpse of it once, right after my flame died down out in the cemetery, and once was enough. It was deep and nasty. I rested my head against the mirror at my back as he put the bandage on. I was breathing hard. It was all I could do to help me not scream out loud. We were at a hotel after all; wouldn’t want anyone thinking the worst and calling the authorities.

  “All done,” he said.

  I couldn’t find my words, so I just nodded. He dampened a hand towel and wiped the sweat off my face. It was only then that I remembered that I was still naked. He brushed my hair out of my face and off my shoulders so he could wipe me down and I let him. When my front was clean I slowly got off the counter and turned around. He soaked the cloth with cold water and rung it out on my back, letting the cool water cascade down and it felt wonderful on my hot skin. When he leaned forward to move my hair out of his way I felt his manhood pressed against my butt. He was soft but even so I bit my bottom lip and pressed myself against him just a little more. Ever the gentleman, he didn’t say or presume anything. He just wiped my shoulders clean.

  I turned around and looked up at him. For a year we’ve been doing this dance, one daring the other to make the first move. I was tired of it. Even in the pain that I was in, as tired as I was, I was tired of waiting for the right moment. I got up on my tippy-toes and kissed him and when he kissed me back I wrapped my arms around his neck and explored his mouth with my tongue. He made a very masculine sound of eagerness and cupped my butt with his hands. He lifted me off the ground and I wrapped my legs around his waist.

  He broke from the kiss to look at me from less than an inch away. Everything about him was utterly black, everything but his beautiful smile.

  “I love you,” he said, and as a half-muse I more than felt the weight of his words, I knew they were true.

  I smiled, because I was thrilled to say, “I love you too,” and mean it with all my heart. He gave me a big white smile and carried me off, out of the bathroom and into the bedroom. There were two identical queen beds and he set me down gently on the closest one.

  The room was pitch back and Damon was lost to it. I looked on with wide eyes, but even the vampire in me couldn’t see him. “Damon?” I asked moments before I felt him climb onto the bed. I felt his naked skin glide between my legs, smooth and hairless. I was expecting him to crawl all the way up my body, but he didn’t. He stopped midway and wrapped his arms around my thighs, careful not to touch my wound. He nuzzled his lips between my legs and kissed me tenderly. I sat up enough to look down, but it was as if the night had wrapped itself around my hips to kiss, lick and nibble. He smiled up at me in the dark and then he licked the most sensitive part of my body. He wrapped his black lips around me and sucked gently, and I flung my head back, grabbed at the blankets with both hands and arched my back as I rode the ecstasy that he brought me.

  “Damon,” I moaned, but he didn’t answer. He brought me to the edge again and again, eating at me so skillfully, so tenderly until I couldn’t help myself any longer. I begged him to come up to me, with my hands in my hair I pleaded with him. “Please, I want you in me.”

  Slowly he kissed his way up my stomach, feeling every curve with his hands and mouth. He stopped at my breasts and seized both of them at once. They overflowed from his large grasp but he massaged them; sucking each nipple in turn and it only made me want him more. I felt him with my hands, mapping his body the only way I could, by touch. I felt the smooth muscles of his back and followed them up to his shoulders, neck, hair and face. I cupped his face and pulled him to me. He came willingly. His chest was pressed firmly against mine as his lips touched mine, soft at first but it grew into something fiercer. I could taste myself on his lips and tongue as we kissed, and I could feel him hard and huge against me.

  He moved up from the kiss and stroked my cheek with his hand. I nuzzled it and smiled up at him. He smiled back. I was glad we waited as long as we did. What a year ago might have been nothing but carnal lust was now something more to both of us.

  His fingers slid through my hair and with a firm grip he kissed me. He widened his stance between my legs and with no hands to guide himself he entered me, hard, wide and long, and I grabbed his arms and moaned my pleasure into his mouth. He burrowed himself deeper inside me.

  He broke from the kiss, “Oh, my God,” he whispered. His lips touched mine as he said it. He brought himself almost all the way out and then back in slowly, over and over again, and each thrust was just as mind blowing as the first.

  He grabbed hold of me and pulled me up into his lap. It hurt my thigh to sit like that, but I wanted him more than I cared about the pain. I sat up and down, moving him in and out of me in a steady rhythm, and he raked his nails down my back as I rode him. I couldn’t help the sounds that were coming from me as we made love. He filled me so completely, both physically and emotionally. It was all too much and soon I felt my climax coming.

  “Hold it,” Damon said. He pulled himself out of me and with his hands he guided my body so that I was on my knees on the bed and he was standing on the floor behind me. He pulled me toward him with his hands at my hips and he entered me from behind. At that angle he reached a whole new depth. He pulled himself out and thrust back in, quick and hard. I came right then and there, but he didn’t stop. He was animalistic; pounding me until I came again, and again, and finally, when I wasn’t sure I could stand anymore pleasure, he came with one last deep thrust.

  ♦

  Damon and I were clean and sleeping sound on the other queen bed when a voice cut through my dreams and I jerked awake. For a moment I thought I was alone in the room, with just Damon sleeping warm at my back, but I wasn’t.

  “That’s a nasty bite you have there,” came an unfamiliar voice from the dark.

  I looked all over the room for the source of the voice, and then a man in a suit and tie was suddenly
standing in the middle of our hotel room. My hand went straight for the gun Damon kept under his pillow. I was a terrible shot, but that was something only more practice could fix. Hey look, practice. “Ghouls are little bastards, aren’t they?” he said

  I held the gun firm with both hands, but I was lying on my side. Even if I didn’t suck out loud, I wasn’t sure I could hit the wide side of a barn in that position. “Who are you?” I asked, loud enough to hopefully wake Damon.

  The man smiled, and it was a warm fun smile. “You don’t recognize me. Fair enough. The last time I made my presence known to you I was feeling, let’s say, theatrical. The entrance, the look, the voice. Intimidating, no?” He paused and looked at me, waiting for me to get it. I didn’t. I was only half listening to him at all. I was wondering why Damon wasn’t waking up. He had excellent hearing. If he wasn’t waking up, then something was very wrong. Shit. The man sighed, and for a second he was as I’d seen him before, an inhuman beast in leather, larger than life and smelling of brimstone. A demon from the pits of hell!

  “Raphael!”

  “Yahtzee!” He moved in closer and I instinctively pulled the trigger. I was more surprised than him when the bullet hit him square in the chest. He pulled it out like it was nothing and dropped it on the floor. “We need to talk.”

  ♦

  A Taste of Book 3

  GRAVE OMEN: CHAPTER ONE

  RAPHAEL WAS AN angel once, but not anymore. He was a demon from hell or Tartarus, or whatever the hell you call it. He came from the place dead people go when they’ve been very naughty. He wasn’t as scary looking as when I’d first met him. Hell, he was almost attractive, but that old familiar terror ran up my back and filled my belly with lead all the same. On the outside he looked like any other man. But he wasn’t. He was alien. The air was thin and electric. He was an otherworldly being of power and malice. Standing in his presence was the most frightening thing I’d ever experienced in my life, and I’d been through some scary shit. He pursed his pouty lips on his oh-so-serious face as I climbed out of the hotel bed naked. Damon slept soundly, and I could guess that the demon had something to do with that.

  I had a heavy gun in my hand, for what good it did me. I’d already shot him once and he just pulled the deformed bullet out of his chest and laughed at me. The damn gun was just a useless paperweight. I set it on the nightstand and made my way to the luggage at the foot of the bed.

  “What do you want to talk about?” I asked. I gave the demon my back as I pulled an oversized tee-shirt out of my bag and slid it on over my head. I was trying to be brave. It was a personal rule of mine to never let anyone know just how scared I was of them. Anyway, if he was going to kill me he could do it easily enough no matter which way I was facing.

  “I’m sorry to interrupt your dreams, Raina. I wouldn’t have come, but I don’t have time enough to waste on sleep.”

  “What does that mean?”

  He waved away my question with a graceful hand. “I’ve been unfair to you,” he said, and he took a seat at the little table in the far corner of the hotel room. Crap. I didn’t want him getting all comfy and whatnot. “I said things out of anger.”

  I leaned my back against the wall with my arms crossed under my breasts. “You mean, when you told me you were going to kill me if I didn’t save your wife?”

  He smiled, and I had to admit that it was a nice one. “Yup,” he said, and then his face was serious again, but not serious-serious, sad-serious. “I knew she was going to die. You couldn’t have saved her, no matter what. If she wasn’t dead already she was nearly there, but I threatened you anyway. It was the actions of a desperate man.”

  “So, why the deal?” I wanted to be brave again and take a seat at the table. If this was going to be a long conversation I wanted to sit, but I couldn’t make myself budge from the wall. It was cool and solid and a reminder that this wasn’t a nightmare. “You said you’d kill me if I didn’t adopt your grandson to make us even-steven, even though he’d already been adopted by Damon.”

  Raphael blinked slowly and took a deep breath. “Please sit.”

  Well, now that he wanted me to sit, I didn’t want to. “No, thanks. Please answer the question. If your threat was hollow, why the deal?”

  “Sit, and I’ll tell you.”

  “Tell me, and I’ll sit,” I said with a raised eyebrow.

  He smiled again. “You do like to play games, don’t you?”

  “A bit.”

  He looked down at his hands resting on the table. “Angels and demons can’t tell the future, but we can see all the pieces on the board. We can guess at outcomes and place our pieces accordingly.”

  I scoffed out loud at that. “So, all the world is one big game of chess to you and I’m just another pawn?”

  He stood up and came to me. I would have backed up, but I was already against the wall. Damn it.

  “Raina, I do believe you have esteem issues. You’re a demigod vampire hybrid. You are the first of your kind. You’re no one’s pawn…A knight maybe,” he said as an afterthought.

  He was three feet from me, and I wasn’t entirely sure I could keep my cool if he took another step. The air was so electrified that it was warm when it entered my lungs, making the hairs on my arms stand on end.

  Still, I couldn’t keep my smart comments to myself. “You sure know how to butter a girl up,” I said after I swallowed past the lump in my throat. “So, what do you want from me now, a kidney?”

  “Want from you? Nothing, nothing more.” He paused for a moment, long enough for me to think I should fill the silence with something. But before I could get another smart comment out he interrupted me, “You asked me why I forced you to take in little Thomas, even though I was in the wrong, even though he already had a new adoring father. The answer is simple. I had a demigoddess in one hand and a small boy in the other. People may want to hurt Thomas in the future. Damon is a capable enough beast, but I think you might be a more effective threat against those people.”

  “Who would want to hurt him?” He shrugged; a simple gesture for a demon. It didn’t mean that he didn’t know. It meant that he wasn’t going to tell me. I dropped the issue. I was pretty sure I could come up with a list of likely suspects anyhow. Anyone his late-malevolent grandfather, Admetus, might have slighted (that was a lot of people) and anyone who hunts werewolves for sport (also, a fairly long list). “Why are you here?”

  “To make us even-steven,” he said. “I owe you.”

  “So, what, I get a wish?”

  He chuckled. “You’re fun. We should hang out more often.”

  My eyes went wide and my pulse quickened. The thought of seeing more of him was not a comforting one. “Sorry, I’m booked up for this lifetime,” I said with a cheesy please-don’t-kill-me sort of grin.

  He smiled again and moved closer. I made some small involuntary noise of protest. He was inches from me, looking down at me from an impressive height. “Your next life then…” The look in his eyes was serious for a moment, and then he smiled wide. He was playing with me. I wasn’t having fun. “No wishes. I’m not a fucking genie. I’m going to tell you something important, and then I’m going to go. I’ll answer no questions and I won’t repeat myself, so listen closely.” I gave him a silent nod. “You’ll want to come closer.” I leaned in a bit, away from the wall. “Closer,” he whispered.

  I looked at him with a raised eye brow. “What is it?”

  He raised his hand and slid the back of it against the front of my shirt, caressing the curve of my large breasts, my stomach and to lower parts. I was going to be sick. “Adia,” he said with his hand firmly against my lower abdomen. “She’s not dead anymore.”

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