Blood Kiss (30 page)

T
he key turned out to be nothing that you put in a lock. It was more a tangible pass that got two people through a mountain of security that stood around a nondescript door to a nondescript garage structure in a seedy part of downtown Caldwell's mostly abandoned industrial park.

Following behind Butch, but ahead of the trainee he'd brought with them, Marissa found that with her mask in place, she had a confidence she might not otherwise have felt. There was something liberating about hiding your features when you were going into an environment that you didn't know how you were going to handle. It meant you didn't have to self-monitor your expression and fake composure, for one thing. For another, you could more freely try on a persona that could take whatever was thrown at them.

Because who else was going to know the truth?

In the dense darkness of the club's interior, Butch's reassuring hand reached behind and patted around to take hers, and the instant the connection was made, she felt even more confident. Nothing was going to touch her, harm her, unsettle her. Not with him here.

The first thing she became aware of was a growing thumping sound, and she assumed it was the bass beat of some music. As they rounded a tight, architecturally random corner, she discovered it wasn't a concert-worthy set of speakers doing their duty. It was the rhythmic chopping of a grind wheel that seemed to serve no purpose other than to—

Oh. Okaaaaay.

There was a woman with her legs spread underneath it, and the machine was penetrating her with . . .

Looking away, she found a male squeezed into a Lucite box, his naked body contorted, one side open so that people could . . .

Shifting her eyes elsewhere, she saw a row of exam tables, people in latex bodysuits just like hers strapped to them one after another in contorted positions, sexual organs exposed for the consumption of lines of anonymous strangers.

Okaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay, they were in a sex club. Yup.

And it was weird, the interior space was twelve times the size it had appeared from the outside, so it must have been created by knocking out walls of other buildings, that garage thing just the start of a lineup of facilities that had been merged. Everything was dim, everyone was in costumes and masks, and sex in all its permutations and combinations was everywhere.

It was one nonjudgmental experiment and expression of eroticism after another, the moans and groans offering a soundtrack that the techno music complemented rather than overrode.

Bizarrely, she found the whole thing curiously . . . unshocking. And not really ugly, either. The people seemed genuinely turned on—and God, they were so nice. Unlike the few times she'd been out at human gatherings and been gawked at, here, people would meet you in the eye and smile, like you were part of their . . . well, club. And when she bumped into someone, the response was relaxed and nonaggressive.

It all seemed so . . . normal?

Maybe it was the unapologetic nature of it all. Maybe it was the mask hiding her identity. Maybe it was the dead-serious purpose of her being here. Whatever the combination, she was relieved.

Deep into the club, Butch, Axe, and she formed a circle. As Butch looked to her in his skeleton mask, she patted his hand and nodded, giving him the thumbs-up sign.

After he nodded back at her, he turned to Axe. The
two of them leaned in and traded some words. In the meantime, she looked around for some pattern of dress that indicated who was staff.

Had the dead female come here before she died?

A series of flashes lit off over to the left and she narrowed her eyes. Someone was taking photographs of people who were strung up on rotating wheels and incapacitated as men ejaculated on them, whipped them, drew blood.

And that was when she realized . . . the farther they went, the more hard-core things had become.

Had someone taken a game too far with that female? she wondered. And killed her by mistake?

•   •   •

After Butch was sure that Marissa was doing okay, he was all business—and without distraction. That erotic moment with her in the foyer of the mansion had been sexual to him. Everything here in the club? Might as well have been a lawnmower for all he cared. A bowl of oatmeal. A book on Chemistry: As he started to develop a strategy in his head, he was back on his old job, his brain stepping into a set of mental clothes that at once made him hyper-aware and utterly detached from his environment.

And now to hedge his bets: He'd been debating for the last two nights whether or not to tell Axe the real reason they were all at the club. The bene was that they might get somewhere quicker; the ball slapper was that he'd potentially tip off the murderer, either directly or indirectly.

Except he had watched that tape of them talking in the office a hundred times—and he just didn't think the male had murder in him. In a fight? Yes, absolutely. Axe was a tough son of a bitch in training, capable of crushing opponents in the hand-to-hand sparring even if they were taller than he was—and he was vicious at the gun
range and with dagger training, never hesitating to pull the trigger or go for the kill.

But that was a different scenario from brutalizing some female. And for all his hard-core Goth shit, he wasn't cruel and he wasn't insane.

“So I lied,” he said in Axe's ear over the din of moans and techno music.

“Oh, really,” the fighter countered.

“I was just following your example.”

“So honored.”

“I didn't get the ‘key' from a friend. It was taken off a female who was beaten to death. I'm here to find out who killed her, and I'm going to need your help.”

Axe recoiled. And then narrowed his eyes. Leaning back in again, he said, “How do you know I didn't do it?”

“I don't.” Butch met the guy straight in the eye. “I don't know that at all.”

Focusing on the stare behind that mask, he waited to see what those pupils did. With the extra stimulation around them, and the fact that his features were covered, the guy was even more likely to show a nervous reaction.

Instead, they were rock-steady.

Which yup, supported Butch's instinct that the guy hadn't been lying about having yet to see death up close and personal.

“I didn't, by the way,” the male said. “I didn't kill anyone.”

Butch nodded. “I figured. You've got a good conscience—you proved that with how you felt about your pops's death. Your fashion sense, on the other hand, is tragic.”

“It got your ass in here.”

“True, true.” Butch glanced around. “So who's in charge?”

“Wait, tell me more about the female? Maybe I've seen her? Was she one of us?”

“Yup. And I don't know much more than that. There was no ID on her, just that key. She managed to
dematerialize to a safe place—that's where my Marissa found her.” As Axe glanced at his mate, the guy seemed mortified that anyone, especially a female, had been exposed to such a horror. “She was through her transition, with dark hair, and dark blue eyes. That's really all I got.”

“Shit.”

“That just about covers it.”

Not for the first time did Butch wish someone had taken a photograph of her, even if it had been after she had passed. God, he wished there had been shots of the wounds, scrapings under nails, a careful search for fibers on her and her clothes. But none of that had happened, of course. Again, the vampire race had no procedures in place to handle situations like this.

And it was funny, he'd never thought about the societal weakness before. He'd been too busy fighting on the front lines to worry about intra-race problems.

Man, some simple investigative processes would have helped them so much.

Axe shook himself like he was refocusing. “About the staff—look for the red on the costumes. They tend to stay on the periphery unless there's a violation of the consent policy or if things get too out of line, in which case they'll put a stop to whatever it is. And by out of line, I mean anything more than casual bloodshed.”

“Are there any cameras?”

“Probably, but I couldn't tell you where or how to get at them.”

Or how to sift through hundreds of hours of streaming images—which was what you'd end up with, given the size of this place and the number of nights that had passed.

Shit.

They had just entered needle-in-a-haystack territory. And considering what was on the line here, that was about as reassuring as a knife at his throat.

Still, he'd beaten bad odds before.

“Let's go deeper,” he said as he put his arm around his
shellan
. “We need to see everything.”

“T
hey have places . . . places we can go.”

As Craeg spoke into Paradise's ear, he was very aware of how close to the edge he was. But the more she danced against his body, the more the sex took over his brain, kicking the shit out of common sense and rationality, getting him to go all caveman. No panties? Fuuuuuuuck. He really needed to get his hands on more of her, so yeah, it was time to disappear into the back where Novo had told him there were private bathrooms you could use. After all, it was the only way they'd find any privacy tonight. Paradise was going to have to go home at dawn, and it wasn't like she could take him back to her house—not without coming out of the closet about him, which would put her father and them in a very awkward, premature situation.

Plus it was going to be a cold day in hell before he took her to the dump he lived in.

Shit, if he didn't get a release soon, he was going to lose it.

In his pants.

“Show me the way,” she moaned.

Grabbing her hand, he led her through the crowd. And as he passed by the booth where Novo was giving Boone a lap dance—and quite possibly his very first hard-on—Craeg spared a wave at the female and got one in return.

As well as a very knowing look.

The private “bathrooms” were underneath the partial second floor to the north, and as they entered a dimly lit, black-walled hallway, he discovered countless closed
doors. Discreet Occupied signs were flipped in the first seven they went by. Eighth was a charm.

Holding the door open for her, he growled as she passed him by to enter the little tiled room. There was a toilet stall, a sink . . . and a bench—and the squat, tight space was surprisingly clean. Then again, there was a sunken drain in the middle of the floor and a sprinkler head in the ceiling.

They probably bleached 'em after every night.

Making sure the door was locked properly, he grabbed her and pulled her against him, his greedy palms getting into her clothes, feeling the fullness of her breasts, the smoothness of her ass, the heat, the wet fucking heat of her core. He was kissing her out of control already, and she was kissing him back, and God, you'd have sworn they hadn't spent three hours just that morning getting each other off on the phone.

In person, though—in person was where it was at.

And then she was backing up, drawing him with her, taking him to the sink.

With the grace of a dancer, she put her ass on the counter . . . then she drew her knees up and propped her high heels against the narrow walls of the alcove.

Giving him a stunning view of her black thigh-highs and her smooth, slick, bare sex.

“You know what I want,” she said. “And for once, it's not your mouth there.”

Swaying on his feet, he was really goddamn aware that the moment had arrived: His willpower was down to a stump, his sex drive was a roaring engine that wasn't letting him think properly, and fucking hell . . . what he was looking at.

“Are you sure?” he mumbled. While he started undoing the front of his jeans.

“Do you want me to beg?”

“No, because I'd start coming right now.”

He glanced around and didn't see any cameras. But
that didn't mean the fuckers weren't somewhere hidden. “I wish there was another place we could do this.”

“Like I care where we are.”

With that, she undid her blouse, pulled it open, and popped the cups of her bra down so they offered her breasts high and tight to him. Her blond hair was all around her shoulders, her blue eyes were at half mast, and as she ran her tongue over her lips, the tip of his cock tingled like it was going to explode.

“Please,” she moaned, arching like she was in agony.

And that was all it took.

As his erection punched out of the open fly of his jeans, he took the heavy weight in his hand and closed the distance between them. Shit, he couldn't believe this was actually happening. Not the sex part; God knew he'd done that before.

It was the sex-with-
her
part that was getting to him.

Especially as he saw his head right next to everything he wanted. Shutting his eyes briefly, he wanted to say something to make it right for her, look at her in a way that showed he recognized this was a big deal for her, do anything that would turn this experience with a redneck in a club into the reverent, worshipful event it was going to be on his side.

“Yes, I want this,” she said softly. “I want this with you—only with you.”

Lifting his lids, he stared into her hypnotic eyes—and something strange happened. Against the backdrop of the muffled bass beats and the hundreds of humans and the burning desperation pumping in his blood, he felt an abrupt slowdown.

Make this count, he told himself. Make this special for her.

Bringing his head to her core, he brushed his flesh up and down her sex—and she jumped, then bit down on her lip with her fangs.

Her thighs began to tremble. Her breathing quickened. Her scent got heavier, headier.

With a groan of his own, he parted her sex—but he couldn't keep that up. He was about to orgasm all over her.

Arching above her, he supported his weight on his free hand.

“I'll go slow,” was the last rational thing he said.

•   •   •

Paradise was so ready for this, her body both fluid and tense with anticipation. And then she felt him brush against her heat and she nearly orgasmed.

There were so many reasons not to do this, so many reasonable arguments why she should wait for a better moment, a better time, a more stable place in her life and Craeg's. But if the raids had taught her one thing, it was that time was a luxury no mortal could afford to squander.

And her father's words to her before she'd left had resonated not as the warning he had meant them to be, but as the statement of a goal she needed to embrace.

She was in love with this male. Yes, she hadn't known him long, and yes, it was crazy, but no, she had never felt anything close to this connection and what else would you call the emotion? And no, she couldn't control whether Craeg would stay or if he would go tomorrow night, next week, next month, next year—but he was here with her now.

And that was more than she'd ever expected.

Abruptly, a slight pressure registered, the blunt head of him pressing in. And then he was stroking the top of her sex with his thumb, driving her insane, making her feel that fizzy, exciting, burning heat that she now knew was the precursor for the release her body was hungry for.

Reaching for him, she brought his mouth to hers and kissed him, stroked into his mouth with her tongue. She was utterly unafraid. Maybe she should have been, but she almost wanted to get this behind them so that the erotic connection could be given free expression.

Craeg's hips began to roll in and retreat, roll in and retreat, each time his erection going in a little farther.

And then he shifted her around, repositioning her pelvis.

His fingers returned to her, rubbing in a circle as his body went curiously still. She was about to protest, but then the sensations were too much and her brain took a backseat as she started to come—

At that moment, in one strong, powerful thrust, he penetrated past a barrier that broke away with no pain at all.

His whole body began to shake, and the trembling was transmitted into her from where they were joined. And then he began to move inside of her, deeper and deeper, with growing momentum. Thick, he was so thick, and the fullness was . . . incredible. And then there was the feel of his mouth stroking hers as he pumped into her.

No matter what the future held for them, nothing was ever going to change the fact that he was her first.

When she orgasmed, he did, too.

And yes, it was every bit as perfect and beautiful as she could have hoped for it to be. Even in a human club, in a public place, with hundreds of strangers on the far side of a thin door . . . it was heaven.

That was what being with the right person was like, though, wasn't it.