The realization ripped at him, but as that rip turned into a full-blown tear, as if he were physically being rent in two, Stephen reared back his head and yelled at the agony of Edward having already succeeded in his quest.
14
EDWARD HAD NEVER flown faster, and as he followed Stephen’s detailed directions, his vampiric speed and finesse led him straight to the canyon, through its trenches and tunnels, then to Fegan.
The other members of the gang hadn’t even the time to gasp as Edward zipped straight for their creator and materialized before the old vampire, who was sitting on a velvet throne.
A long second passed as Edward stood there, panting, waiting for Fegan to recognize him. Finally, even before the other creature’s sight focused, Edward’s masked scent flared Fegan’s nostrils.
Edward smiled.
“Damn you,” Edward said, just before pulling a short sword out of the scabbard hidden by his coat. He struck without another thought.
The creator’s mouth opened in surprise, but Edward’s aim had been true to Fegan’s neck. The blow turned the glutton completely to a dust that showered like dirty rain over the velvet.
It was that easy.
Edward only had time enough to hear the shouts of the gang and to feel as if he had removed a cancer from the center of him before he convulsed, falling before the empty throne in a mockery of respect for Fegan.
Yet, before everything scrambled inside his brain, before his vision rolled and his body screeched apart, Edward thought of how Stephen’s human woman had looked upon him just after awakening, and how Stephen had looked upon her while believing she was going to die.
The power of their connection rocked Edward into a place where the pain existed outside, not inside. Instead, he felt suspended, floating as his body had been reborn to what it once was.
He found his humanity in a way Stephen had obviously not required, and he groaned at the necessity of it.
At the glorious coming of it.
Eventually, in what seemed like a break in time, everything coalesced, and Edward opened his eyes. Emotion—such true clarity that he could not recognize what he was feeling—rushed upon him. Choking up, he rose to a seated position, taking in the cavern and all its spoils—the excessive chandelier, the rich velvet curtains and portraits. The colors were faded to an eye that was used to vibrancy, but for Edward, the muted hues were heartbreakingly beautiful.
And his hearing…his ears were no longer pierced with the excruciating overkill of everyday sounds. No, there was only drawn-out moaning as the rest of his brothers arose from their lounging areas around the cave. Roger and Henry both inspected their hands in wonder. Rupert touched his chest and let out a belly laugh. Had Edward actually done right by them in terminating their creator?
Only Little Sam wore a crushed scowl as he wobbled to a stand and fell back to his hands and knees. He began to sob.
Human. They were all wonderfully human.
On a broken cry, Edward weakly got to his knees, reaching out to touch Fegan’s deserted throne. He wished to feel the velvet against his skin, to feel the change in everything around him. To feel—feel! It was all so new, so breathtaking.
But, without warning, a scream crushed the serenity, and something flew at him from across the cavern.
Before Edward’s perception settled, he found a black-haired female hunched over him, hellfire in her light brown eyes and fangs gleaming as she hissed.
Who was she? A new member initiated after Edward had left the gang? So why hadn’t she changed, too?
“Murderer,” she said in a garbled tone. “Murderer!”
“It is a reckoning.” Edward’s pulse thudded. Now that he was mortal, he had no defenses, no powers.
“It is an assassination.”
Through her anger, he could see great sadness, as if she genuinely mourned that bastard Fegan.
Edward wished he had the strength to convey what would happen to her after she had lived long enough like this. One night, she would realize the truth about her family—their dysfunction born of an evil patriarch. Like him, she would start to take her victims’ blood peacefully out of pure guilt until more dire actions were required to seek justice. Or she might study the philosophies of diverse cultures while attempting to find truth—any truth—in how she was made to exist in this way.
But right now, in her grief, this angry vampire was threatening to destroy what he had worked so hard to bring about. She had a killing despair in her gaze, and he needed to persuade her that he’d improved her existence, not made it worse.
Yet, before he could begin, she cocked her head.
“I think you are one of them,” she said, her speech slightly accented with a French poison. “You are a deserter.”
“I’m Edward.” A man. A human, for God’s sake. Finally human!
As she arched above him, her eyes taking on even more rage, he could hear the rest of the gang hanging back. There was even a steel rattle, as if perhaps one or more of them were gathering weapons. They would need those to take the place of their preternatural powers if they wished to face this wounded female.
At least, Edward chose to believe they were going to use them on this vampire rather than on him.
The female’s lips twitched. “You never appreciated what Fegan gave you. He gave the same to me, even though he did not bear me.”
No…Oh, no…She hadn’t become mortal because killing Fegan had no effect on a vampire who wasn’t his child.
“You are an ingrate.” Her voice shook. “And you took my savior. You took what he gave so freely.”
The rest of her sentence was implicit: You deserve to be punished for my loss.
Just as he’d sought to punish Fegan for his own.
As he saw the tragic irony, she lashed out in her own act of vengeance, sinking her teeth into his neck. Then she drew her own blood with a slash of a nail to her chest so quickly that he didn’t even have time to resist her in this new human state, to push back before she forced his mouth to her wound.
The blood entered his system like a virus, spreading, altering, bringing back the painful colors and sounds.
With just one bite, everything around him became a scream that shattered every last one of his dreams.
WHILE STEPHEN WRITHED on the desert ground and clutched in agony, Kim reached for him, not knowing what to do to make it stop. She would do anything to make it stop.
“Stephen,” she said, panicking. “Oh, my God…”
The other awakened members of the League had gathered around, too. Powder was holding a cognizant Darlene back as if she might cause more trouble.
But then, as fast as it’d started, it was over. Just like that—a tornado that had spent itself and died.
A whipped Stephen lay on the sand, arms and legs spread, his long hair covering most of his face. It was then, in the aftermath, that Kim realized Edward had made good on his ambitions and killed their creator.
Her blood chilled.
Stephen was…
No. He couldn’t be. Even in her Edward-controlled “sleep” she’d heard everything, as if in a fever dream. Still, she couldn’t grasp the meaning of what she was seeing.
“He’s gone human,” Troy whispered from behind her.
Shocked by the sound of a voice entering her confusion, Kim’s glance sought her cohunter, who’d clearly heard everything, too.
He seemed so sympathetic. “I suspected all along. But it was obvious Stephen wasn’t out to do damage. He would’ve shut all of us up properly, right away, if he wanted to.”
One thing went unsaid by Troy: But I watched. I waited. Just in case.
Kim turned back to Stephen. The moonlight washed over him, and she touched him tentatively, brushing the hair from his face. She sucked in a breath.
He had lost his…She guessed it could be called sheen. No more preternatural gloss, just a broken and bruised man.
No one said a word. Not until Troy backed away, then halted, waitin
g for the rest of his group.
“Let’s leave them alone, guys,” he said.
One by one, they did, though Powder was holding a contrite Darlene as she began to sob. Troy was the last to go, laying a sorry glance on Kim before he turned and followed his League members.
That left her with the empty sounds of the night desert, the hush of air going still.
When she looked back at Stephen, he had opened his eyes and was watching her.
Neither of them said anything.
How could she? It was enough to absorb how his gaze was less of a blazing green and now…softer. Where the color had been a heated cool, now it was tinted with trepidation. His stark emotion drew her in a way it hadn’t before, yet it also scared her to death.
God. She was afraid of him now, so much more afraid than when he’d been a so-called monster.
As if they were living a bad morning after, Stephen turned his back on her and rose to a sitting position. He hunched, defensive, beaten.
“So Edward did it,” Kim said.
Stephen’s voice was ragged. “Yes. I seem to have become…” He laughed, but it was a sound of pain.
This had to be a shock for him, even though she suspected that he’d contained more humanity than he’d realized, all along.
“You’re a man,” she said, “an actual man now.”
“A man,” he repeated, but with more venom than she’d ever heard in her life.
She’d always sensed that a part of him hated what he’d become. So wasn’t this an opportunity for him to right all the wrongs he seemed so sorry for? Wasn’t this good?
She could only sit there. When he chanced a glance back at her, something seemed to crack in him. He assumed the fury of a man who didn’t care what he said anymore. A man who’d lost everything even though he’d gained so much.
“I’m now what you rejected in every other male you’ve been with since that first bite, Kimberly. I’m what you have been running from. So how do I look to you—like another fantasy come true?”
As she fumbled for something to say, he clearly took her silence for something else. He got to his feet, although, it was without his usual self-confidence.
That lack of arrogance seemed to squeeze every last drop of blood out of her heart. He was accessible now, the representation of everything that was fleeting about life, everything that could be snatched away in one traumatic moment.
Still, as he took a step away, she grabbed at his long coat. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“Away. Anywhere. I don’t wish to prolong this.”
“Prolong what?” She shook her head, angry at herself for continuing to play this game when she should be laying everything out right now. Isn’t that what she’d wanted to do back when Edward had been threatening her?
Standing, she held fast to his coat, but he moved away from her, nonetheless, heading in the direction of the old shed. The canvas at the structure’s side beat fruitlessly against the broken frame.
“Stephen!”
He halted, as if commanded. My God, there wasn’t anything vampiric left, yet she still had some kind of power over him.
Why?
“I don’t want you to go,” she whispered.
His chest was rising and falling with the force of his breathing. “But I have gone, Kimberly. The vampire is dead, and there are no more bites in your future. Not with me.”
“Is that what you think?” She laughed, but without mirth. “And here I thought I wasn’t the only one who wanted—” a bolt of fear cut her off, but she was sick of holding back “—who wanted more. Hell, I thought there was more to us.”
“I’m not what you want anymore. I can’t give you what you crave from me.”
The night shifted around them; the moon hid behind a bank of clouds.
Stephen continued, “I gave Edward what he needed because he had you at his mercy. Having to see your life ended…it was not an option. It would have killed me as surely as any weapon.”
Wait. She couldn’t get this through her head. “You did this for me? Not because you wanted to be human again? It was for me?”
“You seem to be the reason for everything, Kimberly. At least, you were.”
She was. What did he think—that she was going to drop him because he couldn’t bite her anymore?
Then again, why shouldn’t he think that, with the way she’d been pursuing bites like a girl in demented heat?
Once more, a zap of fear adrenalized her. Ridiculous. Stephen had made an impossible decision that told her everything about what he felt for her, yet she was still afraid.
Why? Because now, in human form, he was everything she’d turned her back on when he’d bitten her that first time. He symbolized commitment and handing your heart over to another person’s care. He could give her what Lori had taken away—the trust you put in another person when you loved them.
But, as he’d once pointed out, this was a different kind of love, one she’d never allowed herself to indulge in before. It was far more vital, alive in its potential for anguish, passionate to the point of losing your soul.
What would happen if she gave in to it? Just look at the tailspin she’d gone into after Lori’s death. What would it do to her to lose a mate who had shown her a new world, one that didn’t necessarily have anything to do with the preternatural?
She didn’t know what to do; but then again, she really did. She needed to stop him from leaving, from taking the simple yet all-important happiness she’d found with him.
“Even though you don’t have those great powers, anymore,” she said, “you can probably see it in my eyes. I’m terrified, Stephen.”
He looked confused at the irony—she hadn’t run away from his monster, but now that he was a man, she was ready to turn tail and dash.
“This is all new for me, too.” He reached up, hesitated, then indicated her sand-scrubbed arm. “I don’t even have healing powers.”
She swallowed at the sadness in his eyes. Then, as if encouraged by that, he stroked his knuckles over her chest, where her shirt revealed flesh and her heart thumped.
“But this…” he said. “Your skin. It’s just as soft as it was before. That hasn’t changed. Neither has what’s beneath your skin, I hope. But again—” he dragged his fingers to her throat, over her jugular “—I don’t know how to handle my hunger for you now.”
She wasn’t sure how to handle him, either. Fantasies were so easy, because you could just tuck them away when they were over. But this…this?
Her heart tapped against her chest, a message from a more rational part of her that wasn’t absolutely in control yet. “I guess we could try to find out how to deal with what’s happened to us together. We made a good team before, right?”
At his disappointed reaction to her light comment, he turned away, entering the shack’s entrance and pushing back the canvas as a final, symbolic closure.
But she surged forward, into the shack, clinging to him.
She wasn’t letting him go. Couldn’t. Wouldn’t.
With a groan, he cradled her, and they dropped to their knees, then looked down at her, the first spark of hope lighting his eyes as the moon uncovered itself again. It seeped through the slats of the canvas just enough to provide illumination.
“I was missing something with every bite,” she said, starting to shake in earnest. “You. The real Stephen. I kept seeing flashes of that inside of you, but I didn’t realize…”
He merely skimmed her hair back from her face, as if drinking her in.
“Your bite made me feel like I was your everything,” she added, “and I always wanted that, no matter how scared I was. To be someone’s everything.”
“Funny.” Stephen laid his fingers over her lips, his touch seeming to scorch her. “I didn’t have to bite you to feel that way. You got into my blood without my having to taste it. You took me over.”
She finally allowed herself to believe it—to believe in him. His words were like a
cloak wrapped around her, one of those magic ones that kids pretend to use for invisibility or safety. But hers was woven from his sincerity. She’d been in his head and knew him as completely as she could ever want—as completely as a cloak would cover her from now on.
She leaned forward, resting her mouth against his. There was no hint of fangs this time as they breathed against each other, warm, moist tingles of promise.
“You’re so real,” she said against his lips, running a hand down his chest.
His body wasn’t as hard, yet it wasn’t soft, either. Stephen was fit and lithe, an animal made for activity. She stripped off his coat so she could explore more.
After all this, she didn’t need to prove anything to herself, didn’t need a bite for diversion or even reassurance.
Her pulse picked up speed, tapping, tapping. But now she understood what her body was trying to say—she’d hunted for a vampire, but found herself, instead, in the man he had become.
Once she got his coat off, she went to work on his shirt, tearing at it, tossing it away in anticipation of testing his skin with her palms.
“You’re rougher to the touch,” she said, skimming over his bare chest, its firmness and contours. “I like that. I like it a lot.”
He’d been waiting patiently, but it was only when she caught his heated gaze that she realized he’d been watching her the whole time. For a second, she saw a wild craving there, reminding her of what he used to be.
Of how much she still mattered to him.
He hadn’t lost what had attracted her in the first place. That drove her on, and she attacked the top button of his pants. Everything about him was fueling her—the musky smell just beginning to emanate from him, the more primal feel of his skin.
“Do you remember what it was like to make love as a human?” she asked.
He grabbed her wrists just as she parted his fly and exposed his shaft. It was veined and engorged.
“You’re the only woman I can think about now.”
With that, he raised her hands above her head, then slowly peeled her tank top up and off.
Stephen reached behind her to unhook her lacy bra. When her breasts tumbled free, he couldn’t stop lavishing them with his gaze, even as he dropped the material and pressed her hands behind her back.
The Ultimate Bite Page 19