Night Born Read online

  The fact was that the others following her had locked on to her scent, which meant they had experienced it, had tasted her blood—if not personally, then from a family member of hers. And if she was next in line for Slayerhood, the monsters had to have had recent contact with her mother.

  “What have they done?”

  Alex strode toward the street. Rational thinking told him that he didn’t owe this budding Slayer anything. Soon she would have the strength to kill the vampires who went after her, and rightly so. Slayers were part of a necessary checks and balances system that had been in place since the beginning of time.

  But he detested vicious vampires as much as any Slayer did, and had dusted many of them himself. This fascinating blonde upstart didn’t know that. She had been looking at him. For him. He was going to be her target.

  Foreplay? Bloody hell. Her visit to the museum had been a tease. A daringly fatal caress. Their first meeting. Also, though, Alex concluded regretfully, she was a stroke of velvet that could have, in some other lifetime, been so fine against his body. If the fates had been kinder, this woman—this one out of all the rest—would have been a delightful partner in his eternal tryst with time. A bountiful lover.

  Reaching the street, Alex turned up the sidewalk, his senses on full alert. She was walking away, alone, in the night. A suicidal action, since the others were on her trail.

  A Slayer should have known better. A Slayer would have had a chance to survive when confronted, and perhaps been eager to take up the challenge. But this woman wasn’t yet what she was destined to be. At this point, his nameless beauty was still only her mother’s daughter.

  Because of that, Alex decided he had both the time and the inclination to, just this once, save her shapely little Slayer ass.

  He called out to her in a commanding voice anyone other than a vampire hunter had to heed. She stopped partway down the block. Her tremors reached him across the distance.

  “Come back,” he said.

  She turned to face him, looking slight and young and vulnerable in the moonlight, though women genetically altered by Slayer genes possessed certain abnormal sensitivities that affected them all their lives.

  “I need more time,” she said.

  “I’m afraid you don’t have more time.” He walked steadily toward her, willing her to wait.

  “Then I’ll be way too easy. Where’s the sport in that for something like yourself?” she said.

  She’d said “something.” Alex winced.

  “Besides,” she went on, “haven’t you fed enough to last for a while? Hurt my family enough for the time being?”

  Halting just short of touching range, Alex considered her reply. The monsters had met her mother, then, and it hadn’t gone well.

  “What would you know about my behavior?” he asked.

  “I know you all but killed someone very dear to me.”

  Alex studied the pale face in front of him intently, waiting for her to continue.

  “At least you could have the decency to wait until I take over the legacy,” she said. “I have so little time left. I can feel her slipping away. Maybe that means nothing to monsters like you. Maybe you don’t remember being human once, or the concept of loving anyone.”

  But of course, he wanted to protest, she was wrong. He remembered those things all too well, and that was his own particular curse; the thing he carried with him, inside of the creature he had become, at his core.

  He wasn’t like the others of his kind. He had been chosen for immortality, for a specific purpose, along with a few others. He’d been singled out for this kind of existence because of his strength and his honor. He had been given a task that he had carried out for decades on end; one tied to the intrinsic meaning of his name.

  That same honor had long carried him through this new edgy, corrupted existence. And after time spent surrounded by his own kind, he had avoided his fanged brethren, choosing instead to remain as humanlike as possible, while diligently keeping at bay the blood lust that sometimes ripped him apart. Choosing to remain humanlike, against the strange alchemy pushing at him to the contrary.

  Therefore, he didn’t usually take credit for things he did not do. “I didn’t touch your mother,” he said. “Nor have I killed anyone lately, if it’s a confession you’re after.”

  “Liar.”

  The word was a whisper, spoken through tight lips Alex suddenly wanted to kiss the tension from. She was getting closer to her legacy by the minute. The feral attraction between vampires and their hunters was legendary, and he had a prophetic feeling this one could top all the rest. Their unusual bonding was headed in that direction already. His body was alive with longing for this Slayer-in-waiting whose presence felt to him like a blazing beacon of light in an otherwise dark world.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “But you must listen to me.”

  Her pink mouth, the one he wanted to devour, was drawn down at the corners by a pain that nibbled at Alex. He went on staring at her, assessing, absorbing, quickly coming to terms with what was actually going on here.

  The woman across from him wasn’t just afraid for herself and her own well-being. She wasn’t running away for the sole purpose of self-preservation. This is what his senses told him. She might want more time away from him to grow into what she’d soon become, but that wasn’t the main reason for her evasion. She wanted time to be with her dying mother. She wanted to be there when her mother took her last breath.

  He knew something else. This next Slayer hadn’t been fully trained or informed about the specifics of her role. She was flying by the seat of her pants in a situation where nothing could be more dangerous than improvisation.

  The thought stopped his heart, before Alex remembered to start it up again. This woman, who indeed seemed not only innocent, completely vulnerable and uncharacteristically ignorant, actually was all of those things—besides being so damned appealing.

  But the world, as well as the darker things in it, wouldn’t honor a time-out while someone in the line of fire got their act together. She couldn’t actually believe they would.

  Back to saving your ass…

  “I told you that you’re in no danger from me,” he said. “Yet you are in danger.”

  “Vampire-speak for liar,” she insisted.

  He shook his head. “Others will try to get at you before the event occurs. This means they will find you tonight.”

  She blanched at that. “Tonight?”

  Alex realized that he had just given her more bad news. He’d just pronounced her mother’s death sentence. He’d let her know her mother wouldn’t last the night.

  Without meaning to, he had wounded her further and truly regretted that, but they were nearly out of time. The shadows were sliding over themselves up ahead, coagulating at a threatening pace. He knew what lay within those shadows, and how hungry the jackals were. If he were to leave this woman alone, they’d be on her in seconds. Only he stood between her and certain death this night.

  “Please come,” he coaxed, offering her his hand.

  The expression of horror on her face doubled. He changed his offer. “We’ll go to see her. I’ll make sure you get there.”

  “Because it’s the least you can do, after what you’ve done to her? Because you want to finish her off?”

  “I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting the current Slayer in person. I swear this is true. I have not harmed her in any way.”

  “You think me foolish enough to believe you?”

  “Whatever you do or don’t believe, the creatures that attacked her are coming for you. Now. Here. If I lied, why wouldn’t I just let them come, let them have you? You’re after me, are you not? I wouldn’t even have to get my hands bloody if they took care of you for me.”

  That got her attention. But she still assumed he was lying.

  “Come,” Alex repeated. “We’ll go to your mother, and you’ll get the truth.”

  “Over my dead body,” she said.

&n
bsp; “Well.” Alex sighed. “If you’re going to be stubborn, I suppose we’ll have to do this the hard way.”

  The hard way meant pulling her into an alley and shoving her up against a grimy brick wall, then pressing his body to hers, as Danika had imagined him doing in the museum, and before she could utter a protest.

  He would bite her now, then toss her to those he said were coming. Worse, with his thighs against her thighs, and his hips tightly adhered to her own, it was easy to discern his other intentions. The bastard was aroused. By what? The thought of tearing her apart with the same fangs he was lying through?

  “Get off me,” she said.

  “Can’t.”

  Another puff of warm breath stirred her hair. The noticeable hardness between his thighs, indicative of his sudden affection, was dredging up more unanticipated heat within her, in spite of her hatred for him. Yet he had hesitated only long enough to allow her a breath. After that, his hands found her waist. He lifted her off the ground as though she were mere thought, instead of one hundred and ten pounds of flesh and bone cocooned in a heavy wool coat.

  Danika kicked out. Without footing, she struck nothing. She groped for the wall, found no purchase with which to balance herself. She was held there in the air, at eye level with the vampire, and could not look into the eyes searching her face.

  Inside her, in some distant crawl space between logic and a horrific physical urge to wrap her legs around him, Danika realized he was hesitating, not because he was awaiting the arrival of the rest of the monsters, but because he was fighting for control over himself.

  The vampire wanted her. She saw need in the line of his mouth and the raised cords in his neck.

  Was he trying to keep his thirst under wraps long enough to lie to her more, or through her, get to her mother?

  “I’m not what you think I am,” he said.

  “I saw the fangs,” she argued.

  “Yes. There’s that. Though as with mortals, there are things that separate immortals and define us.”

  “Are your kills cleaner than the kills of the others of your kind, maybe? Less messy?”

  He winced, as if her words had stung. Danika found this an odd reaction, and was inexplicably sorry she’d spoken so harshly.

  “If your mother is close to death, there will be only two places she might be,” he reasoned.

  “I will kill you somehow if you even think about those places.”

  “Where, then, do I take you to keep you out of the way? To keep you…”

  “For yourself? For your next meal?”

  Danika knew she was antagonizing him, and that doing so was tantamount to a death sentence. She just couldn’t seem to stop. Arguments, protests and cynicism were all she had left in her arsenal. If Alexander was going to kill her, feed from her or offer her to those he called others, her intention was to maintain her dignity to the end.

  “Safe,” he said. “I was going to say that I’d like to keep you safe.”

  The current of electricity Danika had experienced in the museum hit her again as she hung in the air, in his arms—frying her synapses and her carefully maintained control. Her body rode out the current with a series of shudders that were close to convulsions. Each shudder made her brush up against him.

  She stopped struggling.

  The jolt of current came again with a sizzling sting, hotter than before and more painful, as though a hundred sharp knives had sunk into the muscles beneath her skin. Danika closed her eyes against the discomfort, refusing to cry out, not certain what was happening.

  As fast as that, she was back against the wall, sandwiched between the brick and the vampire’s groin; captive of his many unearthly charms that included the possession of the strength of five hulking men.

  Still, he didn’t bite her.

  Could he actually be trying to safeguard her from the others? The wishful thought brought another burst of heat to sensitive places aching for the truth. Her chest was on fire. Her womb danced in flames.

  Was there such a thing as a vampire acting as protector?

  Of a Slayer?

  Would they both burn in hell if they gave in to whatever was igniting this irrational passion?

  “Let me go,” Danika growled, terrified by the rise of a new longing—this one to have him inside her, then and there. Like the man he certainly wasn’t. Like a one-night stand in a horror movie. Totally unacceptable. Terrible. Slayer sacrilege.

  He had to be doing this to her; weakening her defenses with the combination of his strength and the taut, muscled body that was so like a human’s, only better.

  The fact that vampires and their hunters were created equal in their hunger to both attract and repel each other, was fashioning an attraction ordered by who? Who was ultimately responsible for life and death and everything in between? Who was to blame for this unconscionable meeting of all those things?

  Could God be so cruel?

  Would she feel the same about this once her impending sensibilities settled in? If she lived that long?

  When the vampire’s lips touched hers—not at all chilled, but warm and supple—Danika felt the strength of the lightning-hot current amplify to an alarming level. That current slid down between them—between her chest and his, her hips and his. Sexual heat, terrible in magnitude, burning the edges off her fear.

  Twisting her body, Danika struggling to break free, wanting him, sick about it, horrified by the effort it took to curb reality into its proper channels and hold back.

  Somebody help me!

  Another spear of what felt like lightning struck her as the vampire’s mouth moved, opening slightly. She felt the briefest prick of his fangs on her bottom lip. As she gasped, his breath filled her lungs. Warm breath…

  His mouth rested on hers. His body, plastered to hers, was holding her upright. Her limbs were a jellified mass of uselessness, no good to anyone.

  He was shaking, too. Maybe he wanted to tear into her. Who the hell knew? Maybe he wanted to kiss her to death. The intensity of his need tensed every muscle, and with their closeness, careened through her—as shocking in intensity as the unexplained electrical strikes had been. Danika saw, felt, recognized this vampire’s craving for intimacy through this meeting of their mouths that was surprisingly soft and as seductive as anything she could recall.

  That’s what this fight was about, then, she realized as his mouth withdrew. This vampire had human needs, fueled by the subtleties of an unusual attraction. He was as ambivalent as she was about whether or not to give in to those needs, in the face of approaching trouble from all directions.

  This wasn’t the time or the place for a question and answer session between two beings destined to be enemies and acting like lovers.

  This vampire wasn’t trying to kill her. He didn’t want to kill her, and wouldn’t if his willpower held. He had told her the truth about that. And if he was going for honesty—if that was even possible—could she believe he hadn’t harmed her mother?

  Stunned by the idea and its feeling of rightness, Danika finally looked up…and into Alexander’s sky-blue, drowning-deep eyes.

  Chapter Three

  Alex felt the blackness slide through him that heralded the rise of his thirst, knowing the sensation was magnified by atmospheric feedback. He was picking up the hunger and rage of the other vampires, which meant there were more of them than he had originally thought and also that they’d gotten closer in the seconds he had selfishly cornered the woman in his arms.

  This was a dangerous mistake. Nevertheless, they wouldn’t dare confront his captive in his presence. The misfits would instinctively know how much stronger he was, and how much older. He just had to get her away to safety. He had to move her now. Problem was, safety was a tall order if she wouldn’t believe him.

  Plus, he wasn’t sure he could release her.

  He didn’t want to step back.

  Since the moment her eyes had his, he’d felt senseless. Her green eyes were as hungry as his own and dil
ated in recognition of the degree of danger she faced from all sides.

  As he pushed against her, drawing from her a startled breath, their eyes remained locked. Alex wasn’t going to break the contact. Through this meeting of gazes, he could make her do whatever he wanted. He knew this. She would be his, if he willed it. Right here, if that was his demand.

  Her mouth was quivering, waiting. She also was fighting to regain control over the attraction spreading through her body. But the other, more mindless vampires surrounding them were snapping their fangs in anticipation. And he had never sipped from the vein of a well-intentioned mortal. He wouldn’t command her to do anything against her will, except to agree to let him take her from this place, and from certain death in the shadows.

  Maybe he’d feel differently when she slipped into her alternate form. When she became Slayer they would meet on common ground, powerful and aware of each other in a whole new way. She would know where to find him. The results of this encounter would play out then. There remained a promise of being together in the time ahead, if he got her to safety.

  “If you think you know what I want,” he said to her, “then you understand what waits out there. You know why we have to move.”

  She nodded, her eyes still available to him, and spoke in a husky voice. “I can feel them here. I can also sense the approach of an extension of myself. I’m losing something, and at the same time gaining something else. Is that how it was for you, when you crossed over?”

  “No. I lost everything. I lost my life in order to gain another realm of existence. You won’t lose yours.”

  “I’ll lose my mother’s.”

  “A painful thing,” Alex agreed. “But not the same.”

  “Will it be different tomorrow? Will this be gone?”

  “It will be different. You’ll feel different.”

  “I don’t have time to explore or get to the root of you,” she said. “How can I? How long until she’s gone? Do I have time to get to her? Will you let me get there? For real? Do this one good thing?”