The Gunslinger's Man

by Helena Maeve

  Chapter Eight

  The telltale creak of footsteps on the landing sent a spike of adrenaline down Asher’s spine. He squeezed the pillow with both hands, determined not to give Halloran the satisfaction of seeing his panic.

  If it was like the last time, it would be over as quickly as it began. Halloran wouldn’t stick around to mock him.

  He was a different sort of monster to Octavian.

  Closer now, the steps faltered outside Asher’s bedroom door.

  What was he waiting for, a written invitation? Asher let out an exasperated breath, knowing full well that Halloran could hear him, wanting him to know this show of dithering wasn’t doing them any favors.

  The hinges creaked.

  Moonlight cast a new shadow over the bed, over Asher. The bruise on his neck, already dulled to a fast-fading brown, began to ache with phantom pain.

  It hadn’t hurt so much the last time, but Asher hadn’t stepped on Halloran’s toes then. He kept as still as a dog playing dead. The mattress dipped, his heart threatening to leap out of his chest.

  Just do it already.

  If it hurt to have his throat ripped open, then it would hurt. Halloran wouldn’t kill him—Asher was mostly certain of that—because to do so would be to deny himself the pleasure of tormenting Asher further.

  He tried to take comfort in that flimsy logic as he registered the touch of cold fingertips at his nape, astonishingly tentative. A shiver swept through him. He got the message. Pressing his face fully into the pillow beneath his head, Asher braced himself for what was to come.

  He didn’t expect to feel Halloran’s fingertips travel to his jaw and bring him back to the way he had been—right cheek exposed, the corner of his quivering mouth visible. His treacherous eye open.

  “Is it so bad?” Halloran asked, voice little more than a whisper.

  “What do you think?” Asher snorted. “Why do you care?”

  The answer, he would have thought, was simple. Halloran didn’t. Blackjack had called what he was doing to Charlie supper and while Charlie didn’t seem to mind it much, he was an exception. The few times Asher had been mauled, he’d felt the pull of abraded skin for days after. The sense of humiliation had lasted longer.

  Halloran’s bite was no exception.

  “You’re my property,” he said, eschewing both questions.

  “Thanks for reminding me. As if I could forget, as if—”

  “You’re my property,” Halloran repeated, harsher, “and I care if you are hurt.”

  Liar.

  Halloran could claim to own his body and control his movements, but until and unless Ambrose worked some of that black magic to rule Asher’s mind, his thoughts were his own. And in his thoughts, Halloran’s soft murmurs could be challenged and picked apart like the falsehoods they were.

  He shivered when Halloran touched the two scars on his neck, one pinprick for each canine.

  Halloran must have felt it too. He sighed. “I see.” He relented, though, and began to lower the coverlet instead.

  On instinct, Asher seized hold of it with one cramping hand. He wasn’t naked this time, but a flimsy cotton shirt wouldn’t be much barrier against a vampire—or the effect he had on Asher.

  Halloran huffed out an exasperated, gratuitous breath, and grabbed his wrist.

  Asher had always been told he had stupidly large hands, ill-suited to the fine work Uncle Howard did in his workroom. There was something slightly comical about Halloran trying to envelop his big, clumsy fist within his rough grip and failing.

  At least, it was amusing before moonlight caught on his ivory-white fangs and Asher forgot how to make his lungs work. His muscles locked with terror.

  He was keenly aware of Halloran behind him, the thin bedspread doing little to disguise the unnatural chill of his body, of Halloran’s free hand just grazing his shoulder—of nothing at all, as Halloran pierced his flesh with sharp canines.

  A muted gasp escaped Asher.

  The sting of the bite was less painful than pricking himself with a sewing needle. The strange, not entirely unpleasant sensation of Halloran coaxing out his blood was harder to quantify.

  Asher buried a whimper into the pillow, shaking as Halloran dragged his tongue over the small wound, greedily lapping up his blood. He felt drained by the sensation. He felt cocooned in warmth, which was perceptibly impossible. It was common knowledge that vampires ran cool.

  It was also known that any human who didn’t find their bite repulsive was asking for it.

  Asher tried in vain to tuck a knee against his chest to give himself some reprieve, but Halloran misjudged his fruitless wriggling as an attempt to shake him off. He pressed more pointedly into Asher, his barrel chest as heavy as ballast, weighing Asher’s rib cage down.

  It should’ve hurt. At best, it should have worried him to have his breaths shortened and Halloran’s grip on his lax hand turn almost brutal.

  Halloran wrenched his mouth away with a wet sound. “Would you stop—”

  “I can’t,” Asher panted, at once angry and ashamed.

  Whether uncomprehending or simply frustrated to have his meal interrupted, Halloran stilled against him. “Again?”

  Asher’s face burned with mortification.

  Why should it surprise him that Halloran had noticed it the first time? He’d probably told Nyle and they’d had a big guffaw about the whore upstairs. For all his scruples against screwing Madame Melva’s girls, Halloran seemed to have no compunction about using Asher.

  The mattress dipped, the cool evening air slithering over Asher’s feverish back. For a moment, he thought he’d managed to put Halloran off and felt strangely bereft at the prospect. But Halloran didn’t go far. Sliding an arm around Asher’s chest, he tugged him back, their bodies aligning as he deprived Asher of even the minute friction he’d been able to enjoy against the sheets.

  “What,” Asher started, only for his throat to clamp shut before he could say more.

  Halloran wasn’t finished. The touch of his warm lips to Asher’s wrist sent a bolt of need deep into his belly.

  Fuck. Gripping the bedding only tided Asher over for so long. His cock arched away from his body, twitching with interest at every flick of Halloran’s lips. It was as if a wire connected wrist and erection.

  Asher was too weak to deny himself for long. Guilt gnawed at him as he curled his free hand around his length. He was in bed with the man who had betrayed him, who had as good as murdered his friends. A monster. And he was coming within a handful of strokes, jerking in Halloran’s hold like trout on a line.

  Halloran steadied him, his hand splayed over Asher’s heart. He could have reached in past the mess of bone and organs and plucked out the thudding muscle if he’d so wished. He could have done anything to Asher, and no one would call it unlawful.

  What he chose, instead, was to release Asher’s hand and slip his arm free. The bedsprings creaked.

  “I’ll fetch you a rag,” Halloran murmured, a gruff note in his voice.

  Unable to bring himself to meet Halloran’s glare, Asher only nodded. He heard the door open and shut a few moments later but couldn’t muster any anxiety at the thought of Halloran going to summon his friends.

  Between blood loss and climax, he was already half-asleep by the time Halloran returned—alone.

  “Here.” Halloran held out a piece of cloth.

  Asher lacked the energy to put up a fight, even if he’d had the grit. He took the rag. He wiped himself down as best he could with one arm tingling and the other moving like one of his uncle’s herky-jerky automatons. “Is that all?”

  In the dark, Halloran’s features were an assortment of shadows, not particularly handsome but not especially fearsome, either.

  “Go to sleep.”

  Asher tossed the rag to the floor. “Yes, sir.” His eyelids were heavy anyway and he had no burning desire to find out how vampires unwound after a feeding.

  * * * *

  “Wild night?” Nyle
teased.

  Struggling to keep from dropping face-first into his bowl of porridge, Asher could barely muster a glower. Witty retorts lay beyond his reach.

  His silence did little to take the wind out of Nyle’s sails. With a broad grin, Nyle turned one of the kitchen chairs and straddled it. “You didn’t try to fight him off, did you? Guess I shouldn’t put it past you, given your history… Still, if Halloran can’t make you behave, maybe he ought to turn you over to someone who can.”

  “Someone like you?” Blackjack could be as stealthy as a cat at night. He appeared in the kitchen doorway with his hat and boots already on. If he undressed at night like humans did, Asher couldn’t say. He had little practical notion of what vampires did when they weren’t busy tormenting folks.

  Nyle cocked his head without turning around. “Why not? Unlike some people, I like to share.”

  “That’s one way of saying you’ll take another vampire’s leavings.”

  Asher grimaced. Was that what he was now? Had Halloran discarded him after one disappointing night?

  He couldn’t bring himself to feel any relief.

  “Don’t listen to him,” Nyle said, as though guessing Asher’s thoughts. “He’d have you in a heartbeat if Halloran said he could. If you ask me,” he added, lowering his voice, “that’s what he’s waiting for.”

  Aware that he was being bamboozled, Asher still glanced up. Blackjack was watching Nyle with narrowed eyes. He didn’t seem all that interested in Asher. If Charlie were any indication, Blackjack didn’t need to be waiting on anyone’s permission for his next meal.

  “We’re heading out,” he said after a beat. “You want me to tell Halloran you’d rather stick around and play with his bloodbag?”

  Nyle heaved a put-upon sigh. “What fun you are…” He hoisted himself up with uncanny speed, the chair spun around and slotted under the table before the screech of its legs had finished making Asher wince.

  Once they were gone, the front door firmly shut behind them, Asher breathed a little easier. Halloran had likely gone, too, though Asher couldn’t say for sure. Their paths hadn’t crossed this morning. If past experience was prologue, they wouldn’t for another day, at which point Halloran would come to him with some other demand—another ball at Ambrose’s perhaps, or a late night visit to Asher’s bed—and history would repeat itself.

  The front room was empty but for Maud draped over Halloran’s rocking chair like a lizard soaking in the sunlight.

  “Don’t even think about it,” she muttered in response to Archer taking a step closer to the door.

  So I’m free to wander, but not too far. Good to know.

  Asher ignored her and dragged Halloran’s duster off its hook. “There a sewing box somewhere in here?”

  Maud peered at him through her long, feathery lashes. “Might be.”

  “Am I allowed to look around, at least?”

  She shrugged, as if it weren’t up to her. Blackjack had been similarly evasive on the topic of Asher writing his uncle—something Asher had yet to ask Halloran about.

  Yesterday, he would’ve been eager for it. Now, he wasn’t so sure.

  What could he tell Uncle Howard about Willowbranch? That the vampires who peopled it seemed more interested in serving Ambrose than tormenting Asher? That his so-called master had stumbled upon a way to make Asher’s ordeal even worse?

  He was none too gentle in tugging open drawers and peering into cupboards, but Maud didn’t give him the satisfaction of acknowledging his tantrum.

  Twenty minutes later, armed with needle and thread, Asher dropped into a chair at the kitchen table and settled in for another day of waiting.

  Chapter Nine

  Halloran found him placid and quiet when he returned to the ranch that night. Asher kept his mouth shut before the usual barrage of taunts Nyle offered. He ignored Blackjack’s dig as far as the mended duster.

  Stitching was easy. If he got it wrong, Asher could always unravel his work and try again. There were no consequences.

  No collateral damage.

  He went back to his cell unprompted and briefly considered stripping to make things easier. He fell asleep before the click of the door. He didn’t check himself for bruises or bites in the morning.

  Five days passed in equally bland succession. Asher fiddled with the grandfather clock in the front room in a futile attempt to get it working again. When that failed, he resigned himself to dozing, like Maud or Blackjack did when they were charged with watching him. He remained barred from leaving the house, but no one objected to his trawling through the rooms at his leisure. No one seemed concerned with him finding his way to a weapon.

  By then, everyone trusted he had been all but domesticated.

  He still went to his room shortly after the Riders returned from their hunt, chased off by their jubilation as much as Halloran’s dark, brooding presence. Hatred festered in Asher’s chest like gangrene, but after better than a month, it had become a useless burden to carry.

  Now, when the door opened, he merely rolled to his front, bared the unblemished portion of his neck, and waited.

  “You’re about as enthusiastic as a drowned cat,” Halloran muttered from the foot of the bed.

  Asher was past the point of taking offense. Drowned cat, bloodbag—all just words with none of the power a vampire possessed to force his hand. What was the point in fighting the former when the latter was sovereign?

  “Sit up—no, not like that,” Halloran barked, when Asher made to prop himself on elbows and knees. “Don’t make me tell you again.”

  Or what? Asher dropped laboriously against the headboard. “I thought—”

  “I decide when I want your blood. Not you. Understand?”

  Halloran’s growl should have triggered at least a sliver of panic. All Asher could manage was a shrug. The nights were growing longer. Soon he’d be spending most of his days in the dark, with only Halloran’s company to look forward to.

  “Was there something else you wanted?”

  Halloran bit down on thin air, muscles tensing in his whiskered jaw. “Saw your uncle today.” The shadows of the room seemed to muffle his voice, but the creak of the floorboards as he prowled around the bed was comparatively deafening.

  “What?” Asher temporized.

  “Ambrose has him working on some new piece.” Halloran stopped in a shaft of moonlight. “Don’t it bother you?”

  “Why should it? You serve Ambrose.”

  “And you hate me.”

  Asher wondered if he was meant to disagree with that, to claim that he was actually beginning to forgive the unforgivable. He propped a knee up under the covers in hopes of calming the seasick roiling in the pit of his stomach.

  Uncle Howard was alive, and well, and working for the enemy. Did he know what had become of Asher? Did he think on him at all, or was his one and only nephew erased from memory—much like Asher’s parents had been?

  “Blackjack said you wanted to write him.”

  “I did,” Asher admitted.

  “No longer?” At his sigh, Halloran scoffed. “If we all judged as harshly as you do, we’d be hermits. Write him, if you want. I’ll take your letter into town.”

  “Is that part of your duties as my master? Playing mailman?”

  Halloran furrowed his brow. “Are you trying to goad me?”

  Yes. Being kept in limbo, not knowing when the other shoe would drop and fretting in anticipation had begun to grind Asher’s nerves. He snorted a mirthless laugh. “You must not have heard. I have a reputation for irritating your kind. And as it’s my one claim to fame, you can’t expect me to—”

  A sharp intake of breath curbed the remainder of Asher’s retort.

  He’d seen vampires move fast before, but never up close like this and never with one as broad and dangerous as Halloran, whose arms caged Asher when he gripped the headboard on either side of him. Asher couldn’t fight a flinch, the urge to recoil as familiar to him as breathing. His one concession to
the reckless past was that he didn’t let out the plea that itched to crawl its way onto his lips.

  “You expect to take on Ambrose when you’re so weak?” Halloran snarled, his fangs slowly elongating.

  Asher struggled to suppress a shudder. “That,” he shot back, “was your job. And you failed.”

  It was nothing he hadn’t said to Halloran before, but this time Halloran took the indictment hard. He lunged faster than Asher’s human eyes could follow.

  The headboard hit the wall with a metallic twang. The mattress groaned beneath them. Halloran’s fangs at his neck kept Asher pinned in place, suspended between that searing pain and the lust he’d felt coursing through him every single time Halloran had bitten him in the past.

  Asher got his hands between them, but the strength to push against Halloran never quite materialized. His legs had fallen open when Halloran fell upon him with a lurid show of need. He rocked his hips in a futile quest to find some friction, until Halloran grabbed hold and stilled the attempt.

  “Bastard,” Asher choked out. Halloran’s teeth no longer pierced his skin, but the sensation remained, humming through him with every stroke of lips and tongue. “Fucking b—”

  Halloran made a sound low in his throat and yanked him forward, onto his lap. Asher arched his back, foolishly eager to comply, and nearly came on the spot. His sleep shirt—a gift he’d found on the bed one morning with no mention of whom it might be from—had ridden up his thighs, exposing him. The only barrier between his straining length and Halloran’s body was the coarse fabric of his pants, the chill of his belt buckle. It shouldn’t have been enough to ignite desire in Asher’s veins.

  You hate me, Halloran had said, as though Asher needed reminding.

  He anchored his hand at Halloran’s nape, his fingernails digging sharp points into bulletproof skin. Bloodsuckers could heal mighty quick, but they still felt pain. God only knew that Halloran had earned more than his fair share of hurt.

  Much to Asher’s relish, he groaned into the curve of his neck, pausing in his feeding to snarl, “Do that again and you’ll regret it.”