by Ann Vremont
Athos sank his teeth into Colm’s neck, bringing a second’s worth of sharp pain before Colm’s body relaxed and Athos gained entry into his mind. As Athos probed Colm’s thoughts, images of an auburn-haired beauty swirled before him. Brigit, Colm sighed in the shadowy interiors of his memory.
No, Athos commanded. Show me Sara.
Chapter Thirteen
A cold, serpentine force curled its way around Sara’s mind. She stopped feeding on Colm and raised her head to shake the other presence. Yet, undaunted, it remained, moved in a slithering circle around the inside of her skull. A slime trail of terror blurred her vision. Beneath her, Colm began to wake. He groaned one word—Athos.
Through a fog, Sara saw Colm open his eyes, saw sense—and the danger he presented—return. He felt the presence and recognized it as his salvation.
“Nighty night, Sara.” The needle still jabbed into his lower jaw and he mumbled the words through closed lips.
The invisible other wound around her throat and chest and began slowly squeezing her into submission. Sara’s arms grew numb. She looked at the syringe, the vial still full.
“Yeah, same to you, asshole,” she said and pushed the plunger in a final effort of resistance.
The snakelike coils that held her constricted more tightly but she kept her grip on the syringe until the last of the clear liquid was forced from the vial. Beneath the needle, Colm’s skin swelled from the sudden influx of fluid. His body relaxed beneath her and his faced slipped into an open-eyed blank mask. Feeling as depleted as the vial, Sara collapsed to the floor.
The squeezing sensation snaked its way down to her stomach. Her body was heavy with its added weight, her limbs and mind anesthetized from its venomous nature.
What’s the key to your specialness, Sara? A cold tongue flicked along the inside of her uterus. Its icy touch seeped into her stomach, spread down her thighs until her body was deadened from its chill. Another cold lick along her fallopian tubes and Sara screamed in pain. Is this it? Frigid lips that threatened to tear her tissue in their frozen suckling pulled at her ovaries.
“Please stop,” Sara moaned. Her shoulders jerked as she tried to flail her arms and drive off the danger that existed only inside. Something moved next to her but her eyelids were too heavy to open and assess the new threat. Warm pinpricks dotted her shoulder, sent ice picks of pain running down her arm. Lava, hot and liquid, pressed against her lips, flowed down her throat.
“Listen to me, Sara,” Mathias called to her through the swirling ice that threatened to permanently wrap her in its embrace. Somewhere deep inside of her, the snake hissed and gathered into a tight circle, ready to strike.
“Follow my voice, Sara,” Mathias pleaded. His neck was pressed against her lips, a stream of blood warming her throat, thawing her stomach.
Sara curled an arm around Mathias’s neck and shoulder. His own arms were holding her to him. His eyes were closed and he listened to her heartbeat, the flow of her blood, the intake of air. Slowly, he rooted out the presence that had invaded her mind. He grasped the invader in his hands, rolled it between his palms until it was no more than a speck of dust, then blew on it as he whispered its name. “Athos.”
The blood slowed to a trickle and Sara forced her eyes open. With the sleeve of his shirt, Mathias wiped her lips dry and kissed them. Worry clouded his eyes as he smoothed the hair from her forehead. Near them, Colm whimpered, his body paralyzed, his eyes fixed but open.
“What was that?” Sara asked and weakly pointed a finger at the syringe that had fallen to the floor.
Mathias sniffed the air and his lips curled into a snarl. “Hypnos—an amped up opium that our bodies don’t metabolize any better than a human metabolizes regular opiates,” he answered. “The League has outlawed its possession.”
Sara nodded at the valise.
Refusing to let go of her, Mathias tipped it with his foot, spilling several syringes onto the floor. His arms protectively tightened around Sara. “He was going to take you, to Athos most likely,” he said. “But why?”
“The tablet, too,” Sara said. She thought about his question, felt a sick quickening in her stomach. “I don’t feel safe here,” she said and curled her body against Mathias’s broad chest. “I want to leave.”
He pressed a kiss against the top of her head, her auburn tresses hiding his worried frown. “Yes, we definitely need to leave,” he agreed. “If I’m not mistaken, Athos is on his way.”
Sara jerked at the mention of the Roman’s name. She tried to break free from Mathias, to stand on her own, but he pulled her closer to him, stood up and started toward the door. “The tablet!” she reminded him, her hand stretching out toward the crates. “We need to take it with us.”
Three of his long strides and they were alongside the crates. With one hand, Mathias quickly wrapped the tablet in its cloth and placed it in Sara’s hands. He took the external staircase and Sara saw that he had almost parked over the stairs in his rush to find her. Throwing open the door to the back seat, Mathias packed Sara inside and pulled the seatbelt across her chest.
“Uhm, is that really necessary?” she asked, a relieved giggle stuck in her throat.
A brief smile lit his face as he answered. “If we don’t want the Ryesgate campus police pulling us over, yes.”
He jumped into the driver’s seat, put on his own seatbelt, and swiftly backed the car to the tree line before racing forward to the street. As he pulled onto the street, he flipped his cell phone open. “Ptah,” he barked into the phone. “I just picked Sara up from the safe house… I need a clean-up, but it’s going to be dangerous.”
Warning Ptah about Athos and Colm, Mathias told Ptah to pick up Sara’s car, her bag, anything else she had left behind, then call him back and arrange a drop-off. Sara half-listened to the conversation. She hugged the tablet to her chest, her fingers playing along the strange glyphs that had everyone puzzled. She had seen its mate, photographed it, caressed it when her father wasn’t looking. She closed her eyes and tried to remember the glyphs that had bordered the other side.
Mathias snapped the phone shut and glanced at her in the rear view mirror. “We can’t go back yet,” he said. “You know that?”
“Yes,” she nodded. She had known that when she left the dorm, had made that choice when she attacked Colm. “What’s going to happen?”
“I don’t know,” he answered. “We need to know what Athos is up to… did you see anything when you were in Colm’s mind?”
Too much. She shuddered at the memories of Brigit’s disemboweled body and Kaidryn’s lily-white throat with its gaping slit. “He said they were going to Holbrook… to my father’s school, for the other half of the tablet.”
“We’ll beat them there,” Mathias assured her.
She looked at Mathias, noted the ashen tint to his normally golden brown skin. She still felt his blood in her, regretted that his memories had not flowed with it. Had she taken too much from him? “You look pale, let me drive.”
He frowned and gripped the steering wheel tighter. “No, Sara, not now.”
“Don’t tell me you have a thing against women drivers,” she half-joked from the backseat while she puzzled over the source of his reluctance. “I know the route like the back of my hand—I’ve taken it dozens of times.”
“I know,” he said. “I followed you on all of your trips back to Holbrook.”
The idea of just how long he had been shadowing her made Sara squirm. She thought of the summer break after her freshman year, when Patrick’s parents had dragged him to Europe for a month and she had purposely destroyed her passport ten days before the departure date to avoid going. She had bumped into Brady Grier at the airport after dropping the Burkes off. He was home on two weeks leave before heading back to Camp Pendleton and he was just as hot as she remembered him from her junior year of high school. She had happily, without regret, surrendered her virginity to him.
Sara glanced nervously at Mathias and wondered what he
thought about Brady and the other two men she had slept with since then. Mathias looked up, caught her gaze and smiled.
“You know, I’m really trying not to read what you’re thinking,” he said and the smile grew wider. “But sometimes you project so loudly that I can’t help it.”
“Is that why I can’t drive?” she asked sarcastically. She did not want to have this conversation with him yet. Things were already too weird. She knew so little about him and he seemed to know everything about her. His frown returned, deepened, and Sara felt a prick of alarm. “Is it?” she asked again.
“You’ll always be linked to Colm because he was the one who turned you,” Mathias explained. “And it makes you susceptible to Athos’s probing, too. Especially now that he has already been inside your mind. And if we share blood now, he may worm his way into my mind.”
“Can it work both ways?” she asked. Sara unhooked her seatbelt and slid into the front seat. “Can I read Colm remotely, or Athos?”
“With time, maybe,” he answered.
“Pfft,” Sara huffed at him and turned to the window. How could she find herself completely attracted to someone so politely patronizing? From that first smoky gaze outside the library, he had carried an air of superiority with him, an aura of knowing what was right for her, and always being in control.
Not always, she reminded herself and rolled back to face Mathias. Her hand touched his knee, caressed his thigh in an upward sweep.
“Sara.”
The warning rumbled deep from within his chest, but she ignored it, listened instead to what the rest of his body was telling her. She slid a finger up the outside seam of his pants’ zipper, felt the cock grow hard at her touch. She pressed on the downward slide, her palm covering his cock and slipping between his legs to cup his balls through the fabric. Mathias rewarded her with a delicious gasp.
“When did you become so fast, Ms. Xavier?” he teased and eased forward to fill her hand with the bulge of his erection.
“Me, fast?” she asked in mock innocence and glanced at the speedometer. “You’re the one doing 85.”
“Yes,” he groaned as she undid the button at the top of his fly and slowly unzipped him. “But I really can smell a cop from a mile away.”
He was wearing black silk boxers and she pulled the elastic band down to expose the mocha-colored head of his cock. “I bet you have a spotless driving record,” she mused as she leaned forward to flick the tip with her tongue.
Mathias kept one hand on the wheel and wrapped the other in her auburn hair. “Spotless,” he said, a hint of breathlessness to his agreement.
“Confident, always in control?” she asked before her mouth closed over the head. Her tongue wrapped tightly around the mushroom tip. She forced the boxers down further and swallowed his length in one deep stroke.
“Always,” he gasped and thrust his hips forward, pressed his hand against the back of her head. She increased the pressure surrounding his shaft, then released him at the end of her upward stroke. Mathias moaned in protest and glanced at Sara to see why she had stopped.
“Should I continue?” she asked. “It could be dangerous.”
“It’s only dangerous if you stop.” His hand slipped free from her hair, slid between her arm and side and wrapped around her breast to gently pinch her nipple.
Her body responded to his expert teasing and she took his cock in her mouth again. She swirled her tongue around its bulbous top, probed the small opening while she suckled the swollen head. His pants were loose enough that she could ease her hand under the boxers to massage his testicles and perineum as her lips moved in deepening strokes over the length of his cock, her mouth straining to contain the thick shaft.
He ran his hand under her shirt, lifted the cup of her bra to expose her breast. Pulling the nipple taut, he rolled it between his fingers. “God, Sara, I want you in so many ways.”
His touch kindled a fire in her cunt. Her body tried to drown the flame. Thick fluids lined the walls of her vagina, dampened the crotch of her pants as she squirmed against the seat. Her mouth contracted around his cock and she milked him in long strokes, her lips squeezing the tip to immediately descend and graze against his balls.
With a final hard pinch of her nipple, Mathias released Sara’s breast and ran his hand along her spine and over her ass. He could feel the heat emanating from between her legs, smell the syrupy fluids that coated her pussy. With his index and middle finger, he rubbed the outside seam of her pants. Sara curled closer to him, her ass moving rhythmically against his hand while she pumped his cock more furiously. Her knuckle pressed firmly against his perineum before sliding down to circle his hole.
He called her name, raised his hips as he squeezed her cunt. She felt the car accelerate, veer slightly to the left as his semen filled her mouth in a hot burst. His hand left her jeans and he clasped her head to his cock, watching as she coaxed every last drop from him and then licked him clean from the base to his pulsing tip.
“Lay back,” Mathias urged and reached over her to collapse the seat. “Let me finish you,” he begged, his shaking hand struggling with her button.
Sara pulled her pants past her knees and lay back, legs spread. He slid a finger between her legs, moistened it before returning to her clit. He pinched the swollen nub, pulled it.
“I want to taste you,” he groaned and dipped his fingers a second time before bringing them to his lips. The sight of him licking her from his fingers sent a spasm through her pussy, releasing greater quantities of the sweet liquid.
“Wider,” he urged and stroked her clit with his thumb. “Hold yourself open for me.”
Sara reached down, spread the top of her cunt lips. Mathias leaned forward, his chest straining against the steering wheel, and thrust three fingers into Sara. His gaze left the road, fixed on her pussy as she thrust against his fingers, her own hand racing over the top of her clit. She was biting her lower lip, blood pearling at one corner as she tossed her head from side to side. Somewhere next to their straining bodies, his cell phone beeped.
“Don’t stop,” she begged, her hips riding higher. Her eyes were pressed shut, tears of passion squeezed from them. Mathias assured her he wouldn’t stop. He slipped a fourth finger in, the strokes growing shallower as he flexed and filled the spongy exterior. She grabbed his wrist, fixed his hand in place while she contracted around it in climax.
Mathias eased the car to the side of the road and pulled Sara to him. He covered her face in kisses, stroked her cheek as she cried against him, her body still awash in heated pleasure. “I’ll never stop loving you,” he promised.
Chapter Fourteen
Mathias pulled the car back onto the road just as his cell phone began chirping again. He flipped the phone open and calmly listened to Ptah’s equally calm complaints about their failing to answer the phone earlier.
“I was indisposed,” Mathias said and flashed a grin at Sara.
The smile sent another warm flush racing over her body and she let her gaze travel over the hard lines of his body. Silently, she cursed Athos and Colm for their intrigues and the trip she had to make to Holbrook. She wanted nothing more than to be holed up in some cabin being fucked four ways to Sunday by the man sitting next to her.
Sara’s gaze returned to his face. The naughty grin had been replaced by a tight line of concern. He grunted into the phone, flipped it shut and tossed it into the back seat.
“What’s wrong?” Sara demanded.
“The police found Patrick’s body in your car at the safe house,” he answered, instantly erasing the aroused flush that had heated her body. “All of your things are being held by the police and there’s a cop at your dorm room.”
“His body?” Sara stammered. Her hand flew to cover her mouth as she considered the meaning of his words. She had been with him only a few hours ago. How could this be?
“Yes,” Mathias answered. “His body. He was stabbed in the chest—repeatedly. The police haven’t decided whether you a
re a victim, or a suspect, but they have an alert out.”
Sara grabbed his arm, squeezed it. “We have to get to my father!”
Mathias shook his head and she pulled away from him.
“You can’t—I can’t just leave him to those monsters!” she yelled. She thought of her father, tall and thin, grey-haired as he approached his mid-sixties, his back slightly rounded from too many years spent in academic toil. His quick mind would do him no good against Athos or Colm.
“Your father will be protected, Sara,” Mathias assured her. “The League doesn’t want to lose him. But the police will expect you to contact him.”
“What does the League know about my father?” she asked. Mathias tilted his head, visibly bit back an answer. She raised her voice, demanded a second time that he tell her why the League should be concerned with Jefferson Xavier. When he reached out to touch her, she swatted his hand away. “Tell me!”
“There are so many things wrapped up in this,” he started.
His eyes were shadowed in dark circles. Worry pinched his face. She didn’t want to hurt him, didn’t want to be the cause of the pain she saw veiled behind his black eyes. “It won’t change my feelings for you,” she said.
“It might,” he answered and reached out to her a second time. She took his hand and kissed it before bringing it to her chest where she held it against her heart.