Doing It To Death

by Kaia Bennett

  He walked into the huge empty space behind us and rolled down the metal door. The outside world faded and we stepped out into the echo chamber of the unit. The sound of doors slamming pinged in the hollow space. Evie went to the rear of the van to help retrieve our baggage, while I approached the Indian man waiting for me.

  He skipped the introductions. “My benefactor has everything set up for you.” He jerked a brown thumb over his shoulder at the doors in the front of the unit. “Through there are the offices. I’ve set up several sleeping areas so you can choose your arrangements. In the morning, I’ll send you on your way with a new truck and a trailer already hooked up in the back.”

  “How big?” We were headed into Canadian winter. The trailer would be essential in case we needed to feed on the road or got stranded somewhere conspicuous.

  “Two-horse trailer. There’s also winter supplies and go bags for the guys.” He nodded a head of thick black waves in Stark and Vaughn’s direction. “Everything in their sizes, as ordered.”

  Their old baggage had probably been seized or left behind in the attic. There hadn’t been time to pack bags for them on the way here, either. Now, they’d be prepared to start a new life in Canada, if need be. An impression of Evie’s sorrow punched me in the gut, though she tried to douse the emotion. A new life. Her family. The price Stark, and even Vaughn, had paid to help us escape. That ever-present human emotion I’d never understood until I met the witch pinged inside me like a ball. Guilt.

  We followed our nameless guide into the hallway. Four doors were open. Inside were nondescript office spaces. They could’ve been a front or they could’ve belonged to actual employees. In each, the desks and chairs were moved to one side and a pull-out bed sat made and ready to collapse onto. A bathroom with small shower sat in the far-right corner.

  “You’ll have to be ready to leave at six a.m. sharp, before the offices open. If you’re hungry, there’s food in the mini fridges and granola bars on top. If you need… other kinds of food,” he offered diplomatically, “we have selections available and units to eat in.”

  “Thank you.” Evie gave the man a soft smile. He blinked, then returned her smile warmly, as if he’d never heard the words before.

  “You’re welcome, miss.”

  Vaughn barely let him finish the word ‘miss’ before interrupting. His raspy voice croaked from sobbing. “Lead the way to the food. I need to eat.” He tossed his bag on the nearest office bed, the second-to-last in line, and stared expectantly at the guide. Our guide’s face tightened into business mode, the warmth in his dark brown eyes shuttering, like the metal door he’d rolled down behind the van.

  “This way, sir.” To the rest of us, he nodded a farewell. “Sleep well. I’ll guide you to the bay your vehicle is housed in come the morning.”

  “Vaughn…”

  He put two fingers up in a ‘later’ gesture at my call and stormed toward the unluckiest prey he’d eaten in some time.

  My eyes narrowed and I looked down at Evie. She’d rubbed her pity off on me for an annoying moment. Pity. By far the worst thing she’d slid into my psyche. What did a hunter do with pity for prey, but starve? Why would we need to pity our fellow predators?

  “You done?” I tapped my temple for emphasis.

  Either to mask her anger at being called out for infiltrating my brain, or to make me jealous, she turned and gave Stark a big hug. The kind reserved for dear friends. Or more.

  “Goodnight, Josh. Thank you again, for today. For everything. I’m so sorry I got you mixed up in this.”

  “No apology necessary. You didn’t do anything.” The detective gave me a challenging stare over her shoulder, the expression unreadable. Before the staring contest could turn into a confrontation, he returned his attention to my mate—my fucking mate—and reassured her with a circular caress between her shoulder blades. “This is the job. I took a leave of absence, and if I need to start over I can. I’ve done that more times than I can count.”

  He released her, but his fingers lingered on the curve of her hip before dropping.

  “But your family—”

  “Aren’t like yours.” Stark sighed and scrubbed the stubble on his weary face with a large hand. “I’m packless, Evie. Some of my family will always welcome me. Some, like my father, will only ever do so begrudgingly. I left them, and for some of the pack, that’s a betrayal. If they never saw me again, life would go on for them. It has to because they have a coven to protect.”

  I thought of Emil Stark, the gruff alpha of Pack Stark. If he never saw his detective son again, I didn’t think he’d bat an eye.

  All because he’d chosen to leave and help lost witches like Evie where he could.

  “Get some rest.” He jerked his chin in my direction. “Good night.”

  He turned and disappeared into the last office.

  I grabbed Evie’s hand, pulled her into the first office, and shut the door. She didn’t fight me, not physically. I didn’t think either of us wanted to pretend we weren’t fucking tonight, let alone sleeping in separate bedrooms.

  “You should’ve stopped Vaughn. Talked to him.”

  I kicked off my shoes without responding and pulled off my shirt. I could smell Eamon’s blood in the dry fibers and the scent sharpened my fangs with rage.

  “He’s in so much pain. He’s going to hurt someone.”

  “He always hurts someone. That sums us up as a species.”

  She tossed her pack on the floor and plopped onto the bed with a weary sigh. I unbuttoned my jeans, smiling when she watched the slide of the zipper and licked her lips instead of flinching.

  “Is that true?” She pinned me with a glance from under raised brows. I slid my jeans off and kicked them into the haphazard pile I’d made of my clothes.

  “Is what true?”

  “Are you really designed to hurt others? Or, is that just what you tell yourself so you don’t have to admit you have a conscience?”

  I closed my eyes and made a revolution with my head, working out the kinks and the annoyance. I had an image of Evie in my mind, an empathic bone in her mouth that she refused to let me take like a feisty puppy.

  “You were made. I was born this way, remember? I would know.”

  I stalked to the bathroom but her soothing tone halted me. “Vaughn wasn’t born this way, either. He was made, like me. Made in the same way as me.”

  I gritted my teeth at the comparison. I doubted if Eamon had cried over Vaughn as my brother took his last human breaths.

  I doubted Eamon had ever thought of Vaughn as anything but a pet to terrorize. To say those things out loud would mean confronting the other side of the coin, the way I’d looked at Evie before her influence seeped into me. In another life, she’d been the one against a wall with a vampire leering down at her. I’d been the monster, reminding her how much she’d come on my cock, flaunting her powerlessness in her face, for sport. Vaughn didn’t need me now. He needed to make something suffer. He needed to forget how I’d let Eamon escape.

  I stormed into the bathroom and slammed the door behind me, but a second later she opened the faux wood panel.

  “You feel guilty. Comforting him means you have to admit you were wrong. It would go against everything you used to believe.” She didn’t gloat. If anything, she sounded near tears, as if she could feel herself flaying me with every truth. My mind sank into the memory of a blade sliding under my skin. The pain of her words, the pain of a knife. My blood and venom flooding my mouth like the crow Evie made me eat.

  “Oh, my God,” Evie gasped.

  I didn’t bother to yell, though I wanted to. I lowered my chin, closed my eyes and showed her everything that had happened to me in the white room, just to get the sharing over with. Cai’s surgical precision, Evie’s surrogate, the vat of dead blood. Drowning over and over, and the scrape of the blade against my ribs. The pop in my brain as my fangs were pulled from my skull.

  When I inhaled and dared a look, she had a hand over he
r ribs, the other over her mouth. Tears fell down her cheeks and she looked down the length of my body as if she couldn’t believe I still stood in one piece. Is she crying for me or for the vicarious pain in her limbs?

  “Not something to cry over. We have a high tolerance for pain. We wouldn’t survive otherwise.” I shrugged. “Plus your blood helped with the healing. More than two linebacker sized humans.” I studied her from head to foot, and she blanched at the swift turn my mind took. From torture to the little deaths of orgasmic blood in the span of a blink.

  I turned on the shower, but still heard her whisper. “Neither of you deserved what happened. You’re not designed for that. That’s sadistic cruelty imposed on the helpless—”

  “I’m fine. You’re alive. Vaughn will live, too.” I stepped in to the small stall, too small to share with Evie the way I wanted to. “You’re distracting me. Let me shower, so you can hurry up and get clean. I wanna taste you again.” I let my gaze linger at the apex of her thighs before I shut the door.

  I heard her sigh through the hiss of the water. I held my breath, trying not to think of all the things that would kill the mood while she used the toilet. I smelled the flow of blood at once, knowing she’d taken out the tampon, and took the quickest shower of my life as a consequence. We traded places, and while I waited for her, I toweled off my hair and checked my pack once more.

  I counted out the full amount of cash. Five hundred thousand in hundreds and twenties, minus the gas money. I checked the passports, one for all four of us. My fingers skimmed leather. Another planner? I blinked in shock, and then laughter bubbled out of my lips when I opened the portfolio.

  I stared at the itinerary my father had compiled for me, all the information he had on witches to date. Saved into my phone? My old list of contacts, including a new number for Cai and some contacts in Canada I didn’t know.

  “Cai, you sly motherfucker.”

  “What’s so funny?”

  I glanced Evie’s way. She’d tied her dark hair in a bun on top of her head, the warm hues in the brown strands glowing in the light. Her skin glistened and dried in the open air. She didn’t wrap a towel around her body this time. I stopped thinking of everything else but her.

  She fidgeted, trying on cavalier nakedness while the light cast shadows over her curves. Her nipples hardened, her thighs swept together to provide friction for her clit beneath the sweet triangle of hair pointing me to my treasure. I saw the little bud peeking demurely from the hood and inhaled the blood joining her arousal.

  “If I hadn’t visited my father, we wouldn’t have been as prepared to run from him. Ironic, isn’t it?”

  She nodded, scrutinizing me while I stacked the wrapped piles of money into the case. I smiled at the visions of me in her mind, the play of muscle and skin on my body under the same golden lights, and the heat rushing behind her cheeks at being caught. I dropped the pack on the floor without another thought and motioned for her to come to me.

  “We should try and get some sleep,” she argued in vain. My lips stopped the rest of her protest with a kiss that bowed her spine and sent a tremor through her that I felt in her thighs.

  “Your favorite wolf can drive tomorrow while we get some rest.”

  A mixture of annoyed huff and weary sigh escaped her lips. She ignored my dig at Stark, though I sensed her tucking that quip away to talk about later.

  I kissed her throat and felt her swallow in response. “I can’t believe I died, got turned, and woke up, still stuck with a period. It’d be almost cruel if not for—”

  “If not for me sucking your pussy dry?”

  I nibbled her collarbone and licked the goosebumps coursing over her skin. Goosebumps formed under my fingertips everywhere I touched her.

  She gasped as I took a nipple into my mouth. I didn’t bleed her breast, though the silky skin capped in dark peaks tempted me. She had plenty of blood to offer, starting with the slickness on her inner thighs.

  I pushed her until she plopped onto the bed. She stared up at me, stunned while I tugged her to the edge and kneeled on the floor before her.

  “The bed. I don’t want to make a mess—”

  I swept her thighs open and over my shoulders, placing a kiss on her stomach.

  “The only mess you’re gonna make is the one I’ll be cleaning up with my tongue.”

  She squealed as I lifted her into the air by my hold on her ass and braced her back with my palms. Her eyes blazed with want as she stared into mine. Already she bucked and swiveled her hips, seeking out friction against my greedy mouth.

  Her heels rode up and down my back as I fed, thighs clenching my head with every climax. I drank every last drop, drank until she begged me to stop. She sucked my cock dry of come as a thank you.

  We slept like the dead, if only for a few hours. We didn’t find a drop of blood on the bed the next morning.

  31

  I pulled on a pair of jeans, cringing at the crunch of Evie’s teeth tearing into the flesh of an apple. She grabbed a bottle of water from the mini fridge and gulped, in between ravenous swallows of the dead thing smearing her lips with juice.

  Her stomach growled in hunger, but she turned to me, her face a mirror of my own disgust.

  “It’s just an apple,” she murmured, dismayed at the intensity of the revulsion infiltrating her mind. “Can you tone it down? I’m done with my period now and I need to eat something with a little less hemoglobin in it.”

  I pursed my lips and zipped, mourning her vampire side as she returned to her stupid human habits. Disgusting.

  “For fuck’s sake. You’re like a fussy baby, and if you don’t stop, you’re gonna make me throw it up,” she chided. “You know what? Whatever, I got it.”

  A moment later my taste buds lit up with the tart crispness of the fruit. My mouth flooded with saliva at the delicious phantom bite. The satisfying crunch, the sweetness of the juice dripping slick and a little frothy from the taut, punctured skin filled my mind. Not just with the taste, but with the satiating fullness in my belly. I tugged a T-shirt on over my damp hair, marveling at the strange similarities between the bites of apple and the plunge of my fangs into a throat pumping with blood.

  She blew my mind when she unwrapped a granola bar and took the first bite. I peered over her shoulder as she dressed, in between bites of food, observing a science experiment in the shape of my mate.

  By nine a.m., we crossed into Ottawa, with a gray four-door Ford truck and a twelve-foot trailer in tow for meals on the go. Everyone sat silent in the truck for the first half of the day, listening to the radio and watching cities and towns turn into the Trans-Canada highway. The events of the previous night still lingered in the air between us.

  We stopped in a shopping plaza in Sudbury, Ontario about four hours later to take a break. The high-maintenance passengers needed to use the bathroom and grab human food. She bonded with Stark over devouring breakfast sandwiches like starved wildcats on National Geographic.

  Vaughn took Sudbury as an opportunity to hop out of the vehicle.

  I followed, concerned by the dark mood hanging over his head like a cloud. “Where you going?”

  “To stretch my legs.”

  “Vaughn.” He stopped and turned. “We’re not hunting here. When we stop tonight in Sault Ste. Marie we’ll—”

  “So, I’m supposed to watch those two chow down all day while a bunch of meals on wheels roll by?” His eyes assessed the passing cars, searched the humans racing in and out of the shops. He flicked the ashes off his cigarette while flinging himself against the side of the truck. “If I’m a good boy, when we stop tonight will you let me have a whole sip before we get herded back on the road?”

  “You’re not starving. You probably ate enough to last you a week last night, and you know it.”

  His glacial gaze wavered before he settled on a glare that reeked of steely indignation. “Since when do we hunt like conservationists? We hunt when we’re hungry, when we need to bust a nut. When w
e’re bored.”

  “When we’re in pain.”

  He jackknifed upright, trying to shoulder past me, but I slammed him against the truck with one hand.

  He squinted under the harsh sun, his pupils black pinpricks surrounded by ice. He forced that wild grin I’d come to expect when he got his rocks off being defiant. Sharp as his knife. A sadist’s smile. I once thought that was just a vampire’s smile, but now—

  “I’m fine. You wanna see pain? You should see this choice piece I fucked last night. She was the grand finale. Made her write her own name in the mess I made on the floor—”

  I grabbed him and shook him to shut him up. Part of me vibrated, the images he conjured setting my imagination on fire. A naked girl, swirling her blood on the wall and the floor, while Vaughn fucked her from behind would’ve turned me on to no end before Evie. Vaughn needed to let off more steam. Once he did it’d be easier to rein in his moods.

  Can we risk a hunt here? Tall pines studded a slope behind the plaza. We could find someone tasty, drag them around the rear of the building and up the incline into the trees.

  But the other part of me couldn’t be distracted. This was about Vaughn and the pain Eamon left lodged in my brother’s chest. This was about visions conjured by blood in a coven circle, the things he’d lost because of his maker. A father, the ability to have a broken heart. This was about all the ways true born had screwed over turned vamps like Vaughn. Like Liam. I understood, in a way. He wanted to prove himself strong, because as a human and as a vampire, he still felt like prey.

  “I tried to kill him for you. One day I will, but right now, I need you thinking and not just feeling. You can feed and kill and fuck what you like when we stop tonight, but we have to play by different rules now. We have to be smart. I don’t have a team of people I can rely on to clean up my messes.”

  “Right. We have to suppress our urges for the witch’s sake. Wouldn’t want to offend your mate or get ourselves slaughtered because you defied your dad to keep her safe.”