“Or that you could see me,” Fred continued, ignoring Ven. “And while we’re at it, how can you see me, and why is fang face leaping to your protection like an overzealous fox terrier?”
Fred folded her arms across her chest, fixed Patrick with a hard look and then turned her attention to his brother. She narrowed her eyes, studying the vamp closer. He wore his human face again, almost a mirror of Patrick’s but slightly paler with less life in the seams around his sharp green eyes. She remembered him. His soul had fought the taking with more strength than she’d ever encountered before. Those with a powerful reason to stay attached to the mortal coil always did, but this one’s soul, Steven Owen Watkins’ soul, had resisted the claiming like the world itself depended on his existence.
She remembered being impressed by his strength and tenacious stubbornness. Two traits he obviously shared with his brother. The night of his claiming came back to her in a flurry of shadows and senses. She’d arrived as he lay stretched on the grimy concrete sidewalk, blood oozing like thick red paint from his neck through the fingers of the young man leaning over him, a man she’d paid little attention to at the time but now realized was her lifeguard eighteen years ago.
A deep squirming sensation unfurled in the pit of her belly and she ran the tip of her tongue over the edge of her teeth. Fang face was pretty damn fine, even more so for the simmering demon lurking in his blood, almost as fine as his human brother, but something felt wrong. Something didn’t gel.
She slid her gaze from Steven, to Patrick and back to the brooding, irritable vampire again. Her spine tingled, a soft tickling itch at her tailbone that made her worry. When that part of her spine tingled, the place where her spine became her tail when she was in her demon form, it was a warning of mischief in the Realm. That part of her spine had tingled the time the fallen star had tried to alter the spiritual status quo, that part of her spine had tingled the time the serpent started up its conversation with Eve, and it tingled now.
Why?
What was it about the Watkins brothers that set off her internal warning system? How could these two men, okay, this one man and this one vampire, have any impact on the Realm?
“I’ve had enough of this, Death.” Steven took a step toward her, his pale-green stare shimmering yellow anger. “Time to tell us what you’re really doing here.”
“It’s been fun, fang face.” She grinned, ignoring his demand. She flicked another quick look at Patrick and the tingle in her spine exploded into an undeniable spasm of sensations, some of them downright delicious.
He stared back at her, a flash of ambiguous color seeming to shimmer through his deep-green eyes.
Who are you, Patrick Watkins?
She touched her tongue to her lips, tasting him still…and transubstantiated herself from his bedroom. Something was not as it was meant to be, and she needed to find out what it was. Now.
Ven raked his fingers through his hair, staring hard at the empty spot in Patrick’s bedroom only seconds earlier occupied by Death, before turning to glare at his semi-naked brother. “I hate to say I told you so, brother—”
“No, you don’t.”
“But I told you so,” he went on, shaking his head. He crossed the room to the tallboy under the window, yanked open the top drawer, snatched out a white t-shirt and threw it at Patrick. “Well, at least I know who’s after you.” He watched his brother pull the item of clothing over his head, forcing aside the driving urge to grab Patrick and shake him. “What I don’t know is why you were lying naked on your bed under the Grim bloody Reaper? I’m telling you here and now, the sight of your erect dick will scar me for life.”
Patrick gave him a dark look. “Don’t you mean will scar you for undeath?”
“Ha ha. There you go again with the lame undead jokes, but it’s not going to work this time.” He folded his arms, fixing Patrick with an equally dark glare. “You’ve got some explaining to do, little brother. What the hell was going on?”
Patrick didn’t say a word. Not for a long moment anyway, and for a second Ven thought he would need to give his brother a kick up the arse. Until Patrick released a harsh sigh and dropped onto the side of the bed, looking up at him with unreadable eyes. “I don’t know what’s going on, Ven. I wish I did.”
Ven frowned. “Maybe we should begin with how Death came to be stark naked and straddling you like a rodeo rider on a prize bull?”
Patrick flashed him a cold grin. “Thanks for the simile, Ven. I keep forgetting you were a journalist before becoming a hellish monster.”
“Still am a journalist, brother. Just freelance now.” He dropped onto the bed beside Patrick. “How else do you think I pay my bills? You don’t become an instant millionaire the second you become a hellish monster, you know. I still have an electricity account, a water account, a phone account, a cell phone, a—”
Patrick raised a hand. “Yeah, okay, I get the point.”
“But I’m still missing one. The point about you and Death naked?”
“I woke up and she was in my room. We argued about Peabody, I grabbed her and suddenly she was naked.”
Ven raised his own hand. “Wait a minute, I’m missing half of that conversation. Who the bloody hell is Peabody?”
Patrick let out another harsh sigh. “A drowning victim today. I’d resuscitated him. Fred touched him. He died.”
Ven shot his eyebrows up. “Fred?”
Patrick shrugged. “Fred. I’m still not convinced she’s what you say she is. Come to think of it, I’m not convinced this isn’t still a dream.”
A tightness pulled at Ven’s unbeating heart. “Dream? What kind of dream?”
Patrick’s eyes closed and he pulled an irritated face. “Fuck. Not this again.”
“You’re still having those nightmares, aren’t you?”
With another, much more violent muttered curse, Patrick rose to his feet. “Leave it alone, Ven. I’ve had a gutful. Whatever it is you think I am, I’m not.”
Hot anger shot through Ven and he stood, glaring at his brother. “How many times have I saved you from dying, Patrick?”
“Jesus, not this again!”
“How many times did I save your life before my death? How many times did I pull you from the surf after a freak wave dumped you under? Wiped you out? How many times did I grab you from the road after you somehow stumbled off the curb into the pathway of a bus, or a truck? How many freak accidents have I saved you from, brother? How many? It seems to me I’ve kept you alive on more than one occasion when some force has been pulling as many strings as possible to see you dead.”
Patrick didn’t respond. Ven studied him, trying not to be angry. His brother had spent his life struggling with something inside him, something he didn’t want to acknowledge or release. But it was there. It wasn’t just his denied ability to see events in the future, nor the way he’d moved the television remote control without touching it. It was something Ven couldn’t explain. Like Patrick was important. More than important. On a level of existence he couldn’t understand or vocalize. He’d sensed it as a human, he’d felt it as vampire. Whatever Patrick was, he was more than he thought, more than he wanted and quite frankly, Ven had had enough of his refusal to see that. His kid brother needed to face it. Especially now that Death was interested in him. “Not to sound churlish, Pat, but I died protecting you. The vamp that attacked us outside the pub was not after me. It was after you. There’s gotta be a reason for that.”
“He was hungry. I was the weaker target. That’s all.”
Ven shook his head. “That’s bullshit, and you know it.”
Patrick shot him a silent look and Ven couldn’t miss the stubborn glint in his eyes, or the bunching tightness in his jaw. His shields were coming up. As they did every time Ven raised the issue.
Biting back an inhuman growl, he stormed across Patrick’s bedroom, heading for the door he’d so recently barged through. “Fuck this,” he threw over his shoulder as he crossed the threshold. “I wa
nt answers.”
And there was only one creature he knew who could provide them.
It was time to face Death. Again.
Chapter Three
Amy Elizabeth Mathieson lay stretched on her bed, gazing up at the ceiling. She ran her hands over her ribcage, down her waist, across her hips, noting with pride the toned muscles and complete absence of fat. She worked hard to stay in shape, spending hours in the gym, even more in Pilates and yoga classes every week. If she didn’t, who knows what vacuous bimbo with a vampire fetish may lure Ven away from her.
Sliding her fingertips up her torso, the sound of Kings Cross’s nightlife wafting through her open window like background music, she traced a slow line over the swell of her bare breasts, circling the nipple on each until they puckered into hard tips.
A shot of heat stabbed into her pussy and she closed her eyes, releasing a soft, hitching sigh. She wanted to feel Ven’s fangs on her nipples. He’d never drawn blood from her there, no matter how often she’d suggested he could. He’d bitten her once or twice, but never with his fangs. Never to feed. What would it feel like for him to do so? To suckle her blood from the tiny wounds he made as he massaged and cupped and squeezed each heavy curve of flesh?
Her pussy fluttered at the thought and she whimpered, arching her back a little to press her thighs together.
Opening her eyes again, she studied the small black cracks marring the white plaster of her ceiling. They looked like tiny varicose veins.
The comparison made her think of her own blood and she lifted her hand to her neck, fingering the pulse beating just below her ear. Ven’s preferred spot to bite.
For three years, she’d been his primary feed source. Almost every night he came to her, made love to her, drank from her. Not just her blood, but her juices as well. He made her come with his mouth and his teeth and his cock and fed on the product of each. Her blood and her cream.
The burn of his penetration—both fangs and cock—was something she didn’t want to live without. It consumed her. The nights he didn’t come to her, she lay waiting, her body on fire, trembling, aching for the pain and the pleasure he brought upon her.
She was a good feed. She knew that. Always there for the vampire when he needed her, never saying no to anything he suggested—and when the mood took him, he suggested some pretty kinky things—offering herself to his every whim and desire. Just as a loyal and loving pet should.
Amy released another sigh, this one not so ragged. Loving. What a hideously dangerous word. A word fraught with pain and complications. How had she let herself fall in love with a vampire? A vampire who’d once been a surfboard-riding journalist, of all things. A smoothie both with his body and his words.
If she’d known what he was when she’d first met him—during a nighttime beach volleyball game at Bondi where he and his brother were wiping the sand with their opponents—she wouldn’t have asked him out for a beer.
Who are you kidding, Amy? The idea of vampires has turned you on since you first saw Brad Pitt as Louis de Pointe du Lac.
A shiver rippled through Amy and she rolled her eyes. Ven made Brad Pitt’s vampire look like a reject from a bad TV show. That he hadn’t revealed to her he was a vamp for close to a month after that first post-beach-volleyball beer only made his appeal all the more intoxicating. She’d been well on her way to falling for him as a human, his dry sarcasm making her laugh, his smoldering green eyes making her burn and his tender, attentive lovemaking making her melt. When he’d finally revealed her fangs to him, his eyes almost nervous, she’d wrapped her arms around his broad shoulders, bowed her neck and whispered yes, oh, Lord, yes, without hesitation or fear.
Three years later and here she was—in lust, in love and intoxicated.
Pressing her fingertips harder to her neck, she licked her lips. She’d asked Ven to “turn” her the last time he’d come to her. She’d practically begged him. The rapture she felt whenever his fangs punctured her neck, the deep, steady burning sensation through her body as he drank from the twin holes… Fuck, she couldn’t go without that. Even twenty-four hours was almost impossible to bear. If she were a vampire too…
A shudder wracked Amy’s petite frame and she let out a gasp. An eternity of that drawing burn was too exquisite to ponder. The idea almost made her come there and then.
Rolling her head to the side, mouth dry, sex throbbing and wet, Amy looked at the clock beside her bed. She frowned.
Nine-sixteen p.m.
Ven should have been here by now.
Her gut clenched and she licked her parched lips, closing her eyes for a moment. She ached for him. A desperate ache low in the pit of her belly.
Rolling from her bed, she stood and crossed to the window, parting the flimsy gauze curtains to stare out into the night. He rarely entered her home that way anymore. Her open invitation allowed him much more freedom to come and go. But every now and again when he was in a playful mood, she’d hear her name whispered and there he’d be, perched on her windowsill, four stories above the ground, grinning at her with that cheeky, sarcastic glint in his pale eyes.
Tonight didn’t seem to be one of those nights.
Amy gazed at the busy street below, watching tourists and locals alike move about the Cross’s main drag, some pausing to listen to the strip-club hawkers, some popping in and out of the various twenty-four-hour stores, some giggling at the hookers teetering along the sidewalk in stiletto boots and leather thongs.
There was no sign of Ven at all.
Her sex constricted with denied need and she frowned. Two nights, now. Two nights that he hadn’t come to her.
She gnawed on her bottom lip, rubbing her palms up and down her bare arms as she did so. The ache in her core grew stronger and her pussy constricted again. God, he wasn’t coming.
Maybe he’s hurt?
The chilling thought shot through Amy’s distraught mind and she sucked in a sharp breath. The paranormal world in Sydney existed in shrouded secrecy, only known to those within it. Territorial demons, vampire hunters, weres, dark elves, shit, even other vampires—all existed side by side in a tenuous concord, all presenting a very real threat to that concord and each other. And from what she could gather, most either targeted Ven or avoided him like the plague.
“That’s it,” she muttered, turning from the Ven-less windowsill. She crossed back to her bed, grabbed the cordless phone on the nightstand and punched in his cell phone number, hands trembling, pussy constricting. She needed to know he was okay almost as much as she needed to feel the burn of his feed.
“G’day, you’ve reached Steven Watkins. Leave a message and I’ll get back to you.”
Amy quickly punched a key on the phone, cutting the connection. She could leave a message, but she didn’t want Ven to think she was desperate.
But you are desperate, girlie girl. Your whole body aches, your cunt feels thick and heavy, your muscles weak and trembly. You know what you want. You know what you need.
She closed her eyes, chewing on her bottom lip before snatching up her jeans and a skimpy black shirt from the end of the bed. Damn it. Damn him. She yanked them over her naked legs and torso, muttering senseless sounds of contempt the whole time.
She did know what she needed, what she craved and hungered for. She needed to feel the burn so fucking much it hurt. And she knew where to go to get it.
She just hoped to God Ven never found out.
***
Ven stepped out of St Vincent’s Hospital ER and stormed along the crowded passageway toward the exit, the glaring fluorescent bulbs above him bleaching his already pale skin to a ghastly white. He weaved his way through waiting patients, worried family members and exhausted interns alike, shutting the potent, tantalizing stench of fresh blood permeating the air from his mind. He was hungry, bloody hungry, but feeding wasn’t the priority at the moment. Finding Death was.
He’d been to just about every hospital, morgue and seedy twenty-four-hour pub he could in the last two ho
urs, hoping to catch her scent. She wasn’t at any of them and nor had she been, not even the Tudor Hotel, inner Sydney’s most dangerous, high-mortality-rate pub, despite the fact a drunk Irish tourist had been stabbed in the neck and died during a brawl over a spilt bottle of Guinness no less than fifty minutes ago.
Wherever Death was, she wasn’t lending a hand to the expiration of the newly dead within a twenty-mile radius.
Meters from the hospital’s exit, he stopped and pulled in a deep breath, tasting the three-a.m. air, hoping to detect even the faintest trace of the Grim Reaper.
The rich, cloying stench of blood filtered through his nose, over his highly tuned olfactory nerves and his mouth flooded with hot saliva. Christ, he was hungry.
He ground his teeth, forcing his fangs to retract and the demon within to back off.
His stomach growled, a wholly human physical reaction to denied sustenance and he bit back a curse. This wouldn’t do. He would need all his strength when he found Death—the dismaying memory of how easily she’d thrown him off back in Patrick’s bedroom was still too fresh to ignore—and unless he fed soon, he’d be weaker than an asthmatic kindergartener.
He pulled his cell from his back pocket, flipped it open and then snapped it shut. Amy would be more than willing to accommodate his hunger right at that moment, but what he needed was a quick, sharp, no-questions-asked feed. In and out in less than ten minutes.
He had two options.
One, he could “charm” his way into the local cop shop and take his pick of any of the scum incarcerated in lock-up. Two, he could hit the Pleasure Pussy Nightclub on Kings Cross’s main drag and take his pick of any of the human females willing and wanting to give themselves to one of Sydney’s underground “creatures”.
His saliva glands exploded again at the thought.
Growling with frustrated impatience—he really didn’t have time for this—he sprinted into the shadows of the hospital’s dimly lit car park and folded space.
There really was no other way to describe the process by which he moved around when in a hurry. He thought of where he wanted to be, pictured it, pictured an impossible fold in reality bringing his current location and his desired location together and then—with a blurring of his surroundings and a white-hot surge of energy through his body—he was there. He knew he physically traveled the distance between the two spots, but how still eluded him. Sometimes he had recollections of flying, the night air kissing his face as the lights of the city streaked beneath him, other times he recalled sensations of sprinting across the ground on what seemed like four feet, each covered in glossy black fur and tipped with sharp, hooked claws. He never questioned the mode of transportation. What mattered was that he got where he wanted to be fast. It had saved Patrick’s life more than once from some unexplained “accident”.
Death, The Vamp and His Brother Page 5