“He’s nae left his house in days.”
“Freda willna let anyone in—she says Dunny’s feelin’ poorly. Sleeps the day away.”
“The poor woman is worrying herself to naught.”
Although Beatrix held no great affection for Dunstan, she was still the Levenach, and she had decided that before she and Alder began their hunt in earnest that night, she would answer her responsibility and at last make a personal call on Dunstan and Freda’s cottage and inquire as to their welfare. Once that chore was done, she could give in to her wild desire to hunt down the bloodsuckers, with the bold and mysterious, amorous and dangerous Alder at her side.
What she was to do about him, Beatrix had no idea.
Alder was uneasy. Their hunt that night had been unsuccessful, but he had feared as much as soon as he and the Levenach had left the dark and seemingly deserted abode belonging to the forest man, Dunstan.
To Alder, the timber and mud house had reeked of vampire.
Beatrix’d had little comment on the absence of the mortal man, save to speculate that perhaps he and Freda had left the Leamhan forest for good. Alder did not think that was so, and he was darkly certain that Laszlo had a hand in whatever evil was afoot.
After all, Alder knew from personal experience that it was the king of the vampires’ nature to use those he considered beneath him for his own gain.
Alder remained more alert than usual throughout the deep hours of their hunt, but he neither sensed nor smelled any further sign of the bloodsuckers. They were obviously in hiding, and that worried Alder more than Dunstan’s mysterious disappearance. A trap was being laid, and Alder used every shred of his keen abilities to try to keep himself and Beatrix from falling into it.
They returned to the White Wolf Inn the hour before dawn, tired and dirty and frustrated. Alder was hungry again, but his need for blood was not yet so great that he felt the Levenach’s life was in danger.
Her breeches, on the other hand, were in grave peril.
A thorny bush had snagged a seam of the heavy woolen pants just under Beatrix’s hip early in the hunt, and ripped a wide gash beneath her right buttock. She’d given the damage little comment, and Alder knew it was because she thought him unable to see the crescent-shaped slice of white flesh flashing at him with every other step. But seen it he had, and imagined a great deal more. He was shaking for her by the time she pushed open the back door of the inn and Alder followed her into the darkened kitchen.
Before she could lay hand to a candle, Alder seized her around her waist from behind, causing her to gasp and clasp both of his forearms with her hands. He nuzzled her hair—the scent of the midnight forest clung to her, damp and dark and cold, mingling with her own sweet sweat like a cologne. He felt his fangs growing behind his lips.
“Alder!” she half-laughed. “I’ll step on the cats. Loose me so that I might give us light.”
“I don’t want light,” he murmured against the shell of her ear. “I want you. In the dark. I can’t wait any longer, Levenach. You’re driving me mad.”
Then she did laugh. “You’re only bothered that there was nae kill tonight. But you’ll nae take it out on me.” She tried to pry his arms from about her torso.
He held tight. “Why not?” he cajoled, beyond reason now. He didn’t care about Laszlo, didn’t care about his soul. Beatrix Levenach’s magic had enchanted him, and his flesh wanted hers. Needed it. Hungered for it. He had never felt so strong and yet powerless in the face of this foreign desire. “You, too, feel the frustration of our wasted efforts. You have no man save me. When I am gone, we will both be alone.”
She grew still. “You would talk of leaving already? We have not yet found Laszlo.”
“We will. Soon. Or he will find us.” Alder had heard the hurt in her words and it cooled his lust somewhat. “Levenach, I spoke true when I said that I was dangerous to you. After Laszlo is dead, I cannot stay. You wouldn’t want me to, if you only knew—”
“That you are using me?” Beatrix interjected, and Alder knew a cool stream of fear in his spine. When he did not answer her, she gave a chuckle. “I’m nae the Levenach for lack of brains, Alder de White. I ken that you’ve nae come here out of the goodness of your heart, if even you possess such a tender thing.”
Alder’s breath caught behind his fangs.
“I know verra little about you,” she continued. “But I do know that our lives are intertwined for the time being. If one of us should die before Laszlo is destroyed, so will the other perish. You need me as much as I need you, and that is why I doona fear you.”
“If you don’t fear me, then lie naked with me tonight.”
She turned her head slightly, as if trying to look into his face. “So that I can bear your bastard?”
Alder shook his head. “You won’t.” It was impossible. “I swear to you.”
She was still for a long moment, and Alder turned her in his arms. “I want you, Beatrix Levenach. I have not lain with a woman in longer than you would believe. Not because I’ve had no chance, but because I’ve not had the desire. My desire for you is destructive, it’s eating at me. It makes me think of doing things you would not like. Violent things.”
“You wouldn’t hurt me, Alder,” Beatrix said softly.
“Don’t be so certain.” He could feel her pounding heart against his chest, pushing the current of warm and rich blood beneath the creamy skin of her breasts like a dangerous tide. He dropped his lips to her neck, fool that he was, to taste her skin. He murmured his dark fantasy against her silkiness. “I want to feel your power mixed with mine while I take you. It would be…spectacular. I want to hear you scream.”
She jolted slightly as her knees buckled and her head fell back. “You’re mesmerizing me.”
“Perhaps,” he conceded. “But I could not if you weren’t willing—you’re too powerful, Levenach. And you want me, as well, do you not?”
“Of course I do,” Beatrix insisted in a fierce whisper. He felt her fingertips crawling up his stomach, her nails digging into his skin, leaving welted crescents as her brand on him. She reached into the V of his shirt and slid her hand behind his head over the pucker of his scar, pulling his mouth against her pulsing neck until Alder’s fangs dug into his own lips. It was as if she knew…she knew he wanted to feed from her, and she was teasing him, daring him. “And it would be spectacular.”
He thought he heard a whimper, and he realized it had come from his own throat. Beatrix crooked a knee and hooked her calf behind Alder’s buttocks, pressing herself into his erection. He bucked. She moaned.
“I have to take you,” Alder said, although the statement was more a plea. He ran his tongue down her neck, across the front of her throat, and up the other side to the opposite ear. His fangs may have skimmed her skin, but he could not care. “Beatrix, Beatrix…”
Her hands left his neck and pushed between their bodies to jerk open his breeches. She plunged her hands between the fabric and his hair and seized him. Alder whipped his face away from her neck and hissed as his fangs erupted fully.
Dropping his own hand to the rip in the seat of her pants, Alder tore the backside of her breeches away in one vicious motion. He lifted her under her buttocks and sat her down hard on the edge of a worktable.
“Not here,” she gasped.
“What?” Alder demanded.
“I cook in here.” She seesawed against his groin, trying to scoot off the table.
“I can’t wait to go upstairs.”
“I canna, either—take me to the common room.”
He lifted her again and she locked her legs about his middle as he carried her into the large dark room and deposited her onto a table before the hearth. She fell onto her back and Alder wasted no time creating a seam in the front of her shirt where none had been. Her breasts fell free. The sight of her, her clothes hanging in shreds from her body, with only the most erotic parts exposed, caused Alder’s hips to pump once reflexively. He felt wild and evil and hungry, a
nd like he would tear her to pieces.
As if she could hear his thoughts, Beatrix demanded, “Don’t hold back.”
It was madness he felt, and Alder gladly embraced it as he pushed his breeches down fully. His vampire eyes could clearly see her sex as he positioned himself at her entrance and he gave an openmouthed sigh at the slick, fiery contact. It had been one hundred years since he’d lain with a woman, but never had he been blessed with such a one as was bared before him now. The Levenach, the most powerful witch in all of the highlands, the most beautiful, the most pure, the—
On the table before him, Beatrix writhed and panted, her eyes flashing witch fire at him. “Do it!” she shouted at him. “Do it now!” She reached up with one long arm and grasped his shirtfront, jerking him forward and atop her with amazing strength.
Alder fell, catching himself with one palm on the tabletop, his other hand seizing one of the Levenach’s breasts, and he thrust his hips forward. She cried out and pulled him more fully into her with her legs, bucking up against him with another ragged cry.
Alder was blinded with sensations as he rocked into Beatrix, causing the table legs to screech on the floor. He wasn’t worried that he hurt her, for the more he gave, the harder, the more she demanded from him. She urged him on mercilessly, heedless to the fact that Alder was on the brink already. With each greedy command she gave, he swelled, ached. His ears rang and he heard strange sounds, smelled odors that didn’t belong—oil and smoke. The heat…
“Fire,” Beatrix gasped.
“I know,” Alder panted back. “I know, I—”
She shoved at his chest. “Nay, Alder—fire! The inn’s afire!”
She rolled from beneath him and Alder struggled to come into reality and see the yellow flames bubbling over the wooden walls only steps away from where he had been crudely taking the Levenach. The dried mud between the timbers cracked audibly in the heat and the entire room rippled with fire, roiled with oil-laced, choking black smoke.
His passion doused by actual flames, Alder yanked his breeches around his waist once more and spun away from the smoke.
The Levenach had vanished.
“Beatrix!”
Alder turned the other way and saw the front door outlined by the sunlight showing through its frame, brighter than the flames that were now creeping across and gnawing on the wide timbers on the ceiling over his head.
Dawn had come.
Alder was trapped.
Chapter Seven
Beatrix swam through the thick smoke, treading the black to the kitchen. She felt blindly for the long, heavy apron hanging on a peg inside the doorway and pulled it over her head to cover herself and scrunched the bodice up over her nose and mouth to filter the choking smoke.
“Bo! Era!” She knew she would not be able to see the cats in the burning fog, but she hoped that they would hear her voice and come to her. When she jerked open the back door, she thought she felt a soft swish past her calf and she left the door swinging wide. She turned back to the kitchen.
How had the common room become engulfed so immediately?
And why wasn’t Alder behind her? She heard a ripping crash from the large room beyond—the sound of wood past its breaking point—then a hoarse cry.
“Alder!” she half choked. “Alder, this way!” It was impossible to see through the smoke—the daylight pushing ineffectively through the back door did little but reflect from the wall of roiling black. Beatrix raised a warding palm at the raven barrier.
“Black as night, flee from my sight! To banish this bane, I call the rain!”
The choking curtain parted and a low white shape began to materialize—larger than Bo or Era, but slinking through the smoke on four legs.
A white wolf, his black eyes rimmed with red, his snowy coat dusted with soot, came at her muzzle first, streaked past her hand, and leapt through the open kitchen door. His big body bumbled into her, and Beatrix felt a slick wetness on her fingers, and the back of her hand. She followed without hesitation.
A crack of thunder heralded their arrival at the front of the inn, which was already coughing smoke from under its thatched eaves, and the first cold, heavy raindrops felt like ice chips on Beatrix’s face. She could hear shouts coming from the woodland path and muffled by the trees as the white wolf bolted into the cover of forest, his left flank a smear of red.
Beatrix spun back to face her home as the rain fell harder around her, sizzling on the coaling timbers and cracking mud. The footfalls of arriving woodland folk pounded into the clearing behind her as she at last saw the two people slumped against the inn’s door.
It was Dunstan, and his wife, Freda, shoulder to shoulder as a companionable married couple should be, only with their severed heads resting neatly in their laps.
Beatrix brought her hands to her mouth to cover her scream and felt the wolf’s cool blood against her lips as the first outraged cries from the Leamhnaigh pierced her core.
“Have mercy, she’s killed Freda and Dunny!”
Beatrix spun around again to face her mistaken accusers, and the rain washed her hair into her eyes. “Nay! I didna! He…they—”
“Look—their blood still on her hands!”
Beatrix stood anchored to the sticky mud before the semicircle of horrified folk, expecting to be rushed at any moment, but they only stood staring at her wide-eyed. Behind her, the inn sizzled in the rain, the flames in retreat, surrender moments away.
“Ye’ll pay for this evil, Beatrix Levenach,” one man said to her, almost sadly. Thunder rumbled over the treetops. “We trusted you. Trusted yer man. Where is he, now? Have you had done with him, as well?”
At this suggestion, the spray of people started like a herd of frightened sheep and began backing away toward the sheltering trees once more. Lightning struck deep in the forest, although the rain was little more than mist now.
“Ye’ll pay,” the man promised again. “And when next we come for you, there’ll be none who will stop us.”
With that dire promise hanging in the humid morning, the Leamhnaigh melted into the tree line like the smoke from the inn’s rooftop and were gone.
A flash of white caught her eye and Beatrix turned her head to see the white wolf limp from the wood and stop, staring at her, his sides heaving, his head down. He regarded her warily, and Bea could see that he was holding his left rear leg slightly aloft.
She sighed. “Come, Alder. Let’s get you inside where I can look at your leg.”
Beatrix turned and began to walk once more toward the back of the inn, not bothering to wait and see if the wolf would follow.
When Alder limped into the kitchen on two legs, the Levenach was already gathering a collection of supplies on the table to tend him. Her torn shirt and breeches were largely covered by one of her innskeep aprons, revealing only her wool-clad calves and the sleeves of her shirt. She glanced over her shoulder at the shuffle and drag of his boots on the stones but then quickly returned her attention to the task before her without comment.
She knew he was the wolf. His cold, heavy heart pounded and he could not bring himself to step closer to her. Perhaps even now the ingredients she readied were the poisons that would kill him. She was strong, she was smart, she was a hunter. She was sworn by her very nature to battle bloodsuckers, of which surely she now suspected he was one.
Beatrix picked up the small tray with one hand and strode to a far corner of the room. Bending at the knees, she pulled aside a heavy woven mat, revealing a square wooden door set in the floor. She pulled on a metal ring and the door rose. She glanced at him, and for a moment Alder thought he saw a flash of doubt in her eyes.
It was gone with her next blink. “Come into the cellar—there willna be as thick of stench, and we will be safe down there should the Leamhnaigh return.”
Then she was descending a set of steps invisible to Alder from where he stood.
He knew his own moment of indecision. The Levenach could very well be leading him to his death. Th
en he remembered her face, her demanding passion as they had made love in the common room. Alder had known from the beginning that his strange relationship with the Levenach would end in death, and as of this day, he would rather it be his own than hers. He would not drink from her. If she wished him dead for what he was, so be it. He followed.
He was only halfway down the steps when he heard her soft command of “teine,” and yellow light bloomed beneath his feet like a magical lake. As he stepped onto the lowest level of the White Wolf Inn, he saw that he was not only in the cellar, but Beatrix Levenach’s bedchamber.
She had secreted herself away from him, he realized, in an area of the inn Alder had never suspected existed. All along, he had thought her just within his reach while he slept, but the Levenach had wisely protected herself.
She walked to the bed pushed against a stone wall, and set the tray of supplies on her woven coverlet. The room was lit by four tall, standing candelabras, each holding seven thin, yellowed tapers. A small wooden table held a wash bowl near the head of the bed, a bright rug covered the oddly fashioned dirt and black stone floor, and pegs along the diagonally ascending risers of steps held a collection of clothing. Mundane furnishings, certainly, common to any simple sleeping room.
But the hair on Alder’s nape prickled and his fangs throbbed instinctively at his folly. He was in the magical lair of the Levenach, and Alder had never felt so vulnerable.
“Lie down,” Beatrix ordered as she strode past him to the hooks on the steps. She selected a long, shapeless gown and then ducked into the shadows under and beyond the stairs.
Alder limped to the bedside and lay down, careful to avoid jostling her supplies. His left leg throbbed and burned. He could feel his fangs semi-erupted in response to the pain.
Born to Bite Bundle Page 13