by Nina Bangs
Riding boots. Kelly just bet he had lots of riding skills.
His gaze slid to her, and he smiled—all smooth, sensual invitation. “You’d be surprised how well I ride.”
Ty’s grip on her tightened. “And you’d be surprised how well I kick vampire butt.”
Jude’s attention shifted to Ty, and his smile widened. “Ah, the T. rex. You intrigued me last night. Nothing has intrigued me in centuries, so I savored the moment.” Even though he sounded almost playful, his dark eyes were watchful.
Kelly stared at Jude with wide eyes, and then she looked up at Ty. “He read my mind. He freaking read my mind.”
Ty allowed himself a tight smile. He had a feeling Kelly’s universe would do a lot of expanding tonight. But he had a question he had to ask Jude before Fin got started. “What’d you do with the body you took away last night?”
The vampire leader raised one dark brow. “Be more specific. Do you mean the part that’s in Galveston Bay, the part that’s in Lake Conroe, or the part that’s floating down Buffalo Bayou?”
Ty couldn’t help it, he laughed. He hoped Jude turned out to be an ally, because he wouldn’t mind fighting beside him. His smile faded. As long as the vampire stayed away from Kelly.
“Glad you could make it. I saved you a seat.” Fin’s smile was open and nonthreatening as he gestured to a chair near him. “We’re new to Houston, and you’re the first guests we’ve had.”
“Do you think Jude will buy Fin’s friendly and harmless act?” Kelly braced her hand on Ty’s thigh as she shifted into a more comfortable position.
Ty almost groaned out loud. He should take Kelly with him whenever he had to be near Fin. All she had to do was touch him and he forgot about his need for violence.
As if given a silent signal, Jude’s three bodyguards moved to different spots in the room, all with good views of Fin and their leader. Jude’s smile was slow and very threatening. “I bet you say that to all your guests right before you kill them.”
Fin’s smile was sincere this time. “That or something similar.”
Jude seemed to relax a little as he took the seat Fin offered. “I suppose you want to know about me first.”
“If you don’t mind.”
Ty translated: If you don’t want to die. From Jude’s expression, he knew it too.
“Vampires have divided the United States into ten territories. I govern the territory that includes Texas. I’m in Houston now because there’s been an outbreak of vampire attacks on humans. We like to keep a low profile. Multiple drainings could out us. So I’m here to pick up the trash and dump it in the compactor.” His gaze never left Fin. “Now who are you, and what are you doing in my territory?” Jude showed some fang to emphasize his question.
A low, rumbling growl came from Q. Ty shook his head at his partner, and Q subsided.
The change in Fin’s expression was subtle, almost as if the angles and planes of his face shifted just enough to reveal something terrifying. Beside Ty, Kelly gasped.
Above the threatening murmurs of his men, Fin smiled his frightening smile, baring his pointed canines. “I admire a lot about you, Jude, especially your teeth. Hope you don’t mind that I borrowed the idea.” He leaned back in his chair. “Technology amazes me. One of my people prepared a PowerPoint presentation. Images enhance understanding.”
Jude chuckled and some of the tension eased from the room. “Way to defuse a situation. It’s tough to enjoy a good bloodbath in the middle of a PowerPoint presentation.”
Fin’s eyes glowed with pleasure. Ty frowned. The bastard was getting a kick out of this. He could make Jude do anything, say anything he wanted, but he enjoyed the game. Always had. Again, he wondered why he was so sure of that.
At some unseen signal from Fin, the lights dimmed, the big-screen TV came on, and the show began. “We existed as Earth’s greatest predators sixty-five million years ago.”
The scene caught at Ty’s throat. His time. And the creatures of his time. As they’d really been, not as he’d seen them when he Googled dinosaurs.
Kelly must’ve felt his tension, because she clasped his hand and squeezed. Warmth flooded him, a feeling that had nothing to do with sex.
Fin’s voice was flat, emotionless as he continued. “Existence on Earth is measured in time periods. It’s been so since the planet formed. And as each time period ends, the same immortals visit Earth once again. Their only goal is to create anarchy by eliminating the dominant life form of that time. When they succeed, the balance the planet has achieved is destroyed and other life forms, weaker or with fewer members, battle for supremacy, and so chaos continues. The immortals have always succeeded.”
Jude’s hiss of surprise was the only other sound in the room.
“But until now, the outcome had fewer ramifications. Forces that exist now didn’t exist during the last Dying Time. Humans are the dominant life form now. Their extinction would cause catastrophic destruction on Earth. And those that came after them would bring unspeakable evil.”
Ty could feel Kelly shiver against him. He bent close and whispered, “It won’t happen. Trust me.” He shocked himself with the ferocity of his promise. Before now, he would’ve said he fought just for the hell of it and because that’s what Fin expected. Now it was more personal, more about Kelly surviving.
“The Mayans understood some of this. Their long count calendar ends on the winter solstice, December twenty-first, 2012 at eleven eleven UT. Then time will reset to zero and start again.” Fin clicked to the next image. “This is what happened to us when time hit zero.”
Ty closed his eyes, shut out what he knew the screen showed. All of his kind dying. The asteroid strike, the volcanic eruptions it triggered, and all the things that had come after. It hadn’t happened over one hour or one day or even one year, but it had happened. Slowly, inexorably.
Ty opened his eyes when he heard another click, opened them to the future.
“That is what will happen on December twenty-first, 2012 at eleven eleven to whatever remains of humanity.” Fin gazed out over the room. He didn’t have to look at the screen.
Kelly gasped. “Omigod.”
Vampires, shape-shifters, demons, and some nonhumans he didn’t recognize were pictured massacring what was left of humanity. Ty’s killing instincts rose on a wave of emotion that forced him to clench his hands into fists, digging his nails into his own flesh. Even pain couldn’t distract him from his need to destroy all of them.
Jude looked puzzled. “If these immortals are that powerful, why don’t they kill everyone themselves? Why even leave the nonhumans alive? They could have the whole planet. And if they called up an asteroid before, why not do that again? It’d be a lot faster.”
“They can’t destroy the dominant species directly.” Fin shook his head at the vagaries of the universe. “Some higher power must’ve set the rules, I guess. So they need minions to do their dirty work for them. And they don’t want everyone dead. They feed on chaos. Can’t have chaos with no one to create it.”
Fin’s smile was bitter. “The asteroid would be a last resort. No fun. Besides, only their leader can call up that kind of cataclysm. And I’m keeping him busy in my own way right now. But that sort of ties up my power. That’s why I need all the help I can get.”
“Fuck.” Jude spoke for all of them.
Fin shrugged. “From a vampire’s point of view, that might look like a bright future. But I promise that civilization will revert to its most primitive state. Earth won’t be a comfortable place to live.” He clicked off the TV.
Jude leaned forward. “I’ve always thought vampires have a vested interest in the future of humanity. Besides, I have business interests and a big home in Austin to protect. How do we stop this?”
“There are ten of them, one who leads and nine who carry out his orders.” Fin’s eyes turned predatory. “I don’t know their names, so I call their leader Zero. He’s mine. The others are numbers too, and we’re working on our own
personal countdown to zero.”
Then his expression returned to calm neutrality. “Zero has targeted all the major cities of the world. One number per city.” He smiled. “Zero is overconfident. A mistake. He thinks it’ll take only one of his immortals to bring a city under his control. Once an immortal has recruited enough nonhumans willing to destroy the city’s human population, he moves on to the next city. I’m calling the one assigned to Houston Nine. He’ll pull together an army ready to rise and kill when the moment comes. He’s already gotten to some of your vampires.”
Jude curled his lip away from his fangs. “We’ll stop that.”
“Tell your people to keep their ears open. Nine is finding a way to recruit. Discover how he’s doing it, and we’ll get rid of him.”
“If I find him, I’ll kill him.” Jude’s eyes glowed black with fury.
“That’ll be tough. He has no weaknesses. But he can be flung back out into the cosmos, and once out, he can’t return until the end of the next time period.”
The vampire didn’t look like he thought throwing Nine out into the cosmos was a satisfying ending. “I find him, I try to kill him. I fail, and I turn him over to you.”
“Give it your best shot.” Fin’s smile said Jude would have to learn the hard way.
Jude stood and started to leave. Then he stopped and turned back to Fin. “Notice that I didn’t ask you a bunch of questions. Like how you’ve managed to exist for millions of years just so you could show up at the right moment to save humanity. And how you know so much about these galactic goons. But tell me, what were you before you were dinosaurs? Because you were something. I’d guess you jumped into the dinosaur bodies the same way you did the human bodies.”
Something about Jude’s question tugged at Ty’s memory. There was something he should know, but it was just out of reach.
A sudden stabbing pain in his head dragged a grunt from Ty. What the…He pressed his palms against the sides of his head to keep his skull from shattering and spilling his brains onto the floor. Kelly’s voice asking him what was wrong sounded like it was coming from far, far away.
Through a haze of pain, Ty heard Fin answer.
“Nothing. We were nothing.”
The agony went as quickly as it had come. The absence of pain left him feeling weak. He couldn’t even remember what he was thinking before it hit. Somewhere in the middle of all that pain, the vampires had left.
“Are you okay? What happened?” Kelly sounded worried as she slid her fingers along his jaw.
He shook his head, trying to shake off the lingering effects of the pain. Her touch helped. A lot. But not in the way she’d want. The feel of her fingers smoothing across his skin was like striking a match against a stick of TNT. An instant superheated explosion of his senses.
“I’m fine. Just a stab of pain in my head. It’s gone now.” But the fierce need she’d ignited wasn’t even close to gone. Tonight. He wanted her warm, naked body beneath him. Wanted her fingers touching his chest, his stomach, reaching between his thighs to cup his balls. Wanted to feel his cock slipping deep inside her.
She nodded but didn’t look convinced. “What Fin said, it’s true?”
“Yeah.” He hadn’t lived through the ending of his time because Fin took his soul before it happened. Seeing the images on the screen, even if they were computer generated, hurt. Not that he’d left anyone behind. Ty frowned. Shouldn’t there have been something, someone he missed? Had his life been that empty?
Ty looked at Kelly. There was real concern for him in her eyes. Maybe he thought of his past life as empty because this one wasn’t. Not as long as Kelly was his driver. He decided that if he lost her, he’d remember, even across millions of years.
Fin started talking, and reluctantly Ty glanced away from her.
“Keep your drivers with you at night. Don’t let them go off by themselves. If any of them have a problem with that, tell me and I’ll get you a new driver.”
“A little late for Neva.” Kelly’s mutter carried to Fin.
Ty waited for Fin to react. He didn’t.
“If you have a confrontation with nonhumans, open your link and tell me.” Fin threw Ty and Q sharp glances. “I’ll send help. And you will not turn that help down just because of pride.”
Whatever else he might have said was lost as thunderous crashes and wild howls seemed to shake the whole condo.
Q winced. “Sounds like Neva’s awake.”
Chapter Eight
Kelly hit the stairs running. She was a step behind Ty, Q, Fin, and the big guy from the back of the room. By the time she reached the third floor, she was puffing.
“Fin has an elevator.” Ty watched as everyone stopped before a large metal door with bars over a small window.
“Don’t. Need. An. Elevator.” She punctuated each word with a gulp for air. What she did need was an exercise program.
“Want me to go in?” The big man peered in the window.
Fin glanced at the woman who’d been assigned to keep watch on Neva. “What happened?”
Tall with short dark hair, the woman looked tough enough to take on a few of Fin’s men. “She started to come to, so I got out of the room. I was about to call you when she changed. She went crazy in there, trying to climb the walls and then throwing herself at the door.”
Fin nodded at the big man. “Go in and see what you can do.”
“Who’s he?” Kelly worried her bottom lip as the heavy metal door shook under the assault of something heavy and determined.
Ty edged closer to the door, pulling Kelly with him. “Car.”
“As in?”
“Carcharodontosaurus.”
“What?”
“Big meat eater.” He hesitated. “Bigger than me.”
“That bothers you, doesn’t it?” Ordinarily, Kelly would chalk up to male ego Ty’s unwillingness to admit that someone was bigger than he. But she was starting to understand what drove him.
“Size, strength, and savagery meant everything in my world. It was all about survival.” He glanced at Car. “Sometimes savagery could trump size, though. The Brothers Grim, better known as Utah, Rap, and Tor, were some of the scariest predators going.” Ty smiled at Car’s back, his eyes gleaming with the hunger for battle. “I’d bet on me in a straight-up fight.” His gaze slid to her. “And that bothers you.”
“Yeah, it does.” She wouldn’t insult him by lying. “I’ve never been in the might-makes-right camp. But I also know that I wouldn’t have survived for five minutes in your world.” Left unsaid was that he was in her world now. Then it occurred to her that if everything Fin said about these cosmic creeps was true, Ty’s take on life might save humanity.
Ty didn’t comment as he turned to watch Car slide open the steel door just enough to slip through. The door clanged shut behind him.
“Can I see?” She didn’t want to see Neva. Kick-butt and badass weren’t adjectives anyone would stick in front of her name. But she owed it to a fellow human to help if she could.
Fin moved aside to make room for her. When she looked through the window, her first impression was of an immense space. The room stretched more than two stories high and took up the whole third floor. The rest of Fin’s condo had walls of glass everywhere. The windows in this room were narrow and small, set close to the ceiling. Was this a ballroom or a prison? She guessed it could serve both purposes.
“It’s a containment room for any of us who feels he’s on the edge and needs a cool-down space.” Fin answered her unspoken question.
“What’s with the human-sized door?” If there was a fire, anything that wasn’t fully human couldn’t escape.
“No one gets out of that room without his soul form under control.” Fin’s tone said that any of his men who couldn’t get their act together long enough to fit through the door would be on their own. “I can’t take a chance of turning one of us loose on the streets while his mind is impaired.”
Now that was a scary scenario
. Still…“You’d just let your own man die?”
“I’d do what I could to save him.”
Kelly figured that would be quite a lot.
She forgot any other questions she might have asked as she got her first look at Neva. If Kelly hadn’t watched Ty and Q fight the werewolves in Memorial Park, she would have been a lot more horrified. Neva looked like them: She was the size of a small pony, with glowing eyes, gaping jaws and lethal-looking teeth.
But there was something different. It was in Neva’s eyes. Kelly tried to get a better look at them, but it was tough because she was in constant motion. Neva must have been out-of-her-mind panicked because she was so busy trying to climb the far wall that she still hadn’t seen Car.
Finally, the wolf spotted him. She froze, then crouched. Kelly recognized that position, but she figured Car did too. Neva came out of her crouch in a giant leap that covered half the room. But Car was quicker. His massive form took shape around him in an instant, cocooning him from the werewolf’s charge. And yes, he was bigger than Ty. His skull alone had to be at least five feet long.
Kelly shook her head as she glanced up at Ty. “That’s so weird. I still don’t get it. I can see Car through the animal, but nothing can get to him….” Neva tested that theory as she bounced off the dinosaur’s chest, cutting short her killing leap. “I understand the shape-shifter concept. Like Neva. The wolf body completely replaces her human one. But with you guys, it’s sort of a layering of forms, one inside the other, both existing at the same time. What I really can’t wrap my mind around is how your dinosaur form can be so lethal when I can still see your human form.” Neva yelped as Car head-butted her, sending her skidding across the floor.
Ty’s smile was slow, sensual, and deadly. All at the same time. “We give true meaning to the term two-natured. When you see us as humans, our soul form still lives in us, only hidden. It comes when we need it, though.”
“I’ve noticed. Strange.”