Kiss of Crimson (42 page)

Elise.

What the hell was she doing here?

Tegan‘s flat stare held Elise transfixed for a moment that seemed to stretch out endlessly. Battle rage had fully transformed his face to that of his true nature—a Breed vampire, with gleaming fangs and fierce eyes that were no longer their usual gemgreen, but swamped with bright, glowing amber that burned like twin flames in his skull.

―Run!‖ he shouted, a deep, otherworldly growl.

―Get out of here—now!‖

That brief inattention cost him. The Rogue he had pinned to the bricks in front of him twisted its big head, jaws wide, huge fangs dripping saliva. It bit down hard on Tegan‘s forearm, ripping into the warrior‘s muscled flesh. Without a sound of pain or anger, Tegan brought his other hand up and buried a blade in the Rogue‘s neck. It dropped, lifeless, its corpse sizzling from the titanium that poisoned its corrupt bloodstream.

Tegan whirled around, his breath sawing out from between his lips, clouding in the chill air.

―Goddamn it, woman—go!‖ he roared, just as the remaining Rogue vaulted into a further attack on him.

Elise jolted into action. She sped out of the alleyway and onto another street, running as fast as her legs would carry her. The small apartment she rented wasn‘t far, just a few long blocks from the train station, but it seemed like miles. She was exhausted from her own ordeal that day, and shaking from the violence she‘d just witnessed in the alley.

And she was worried for Tegan, even though she was certain he didn‘t need her concern. He was a member of the Order, probably the most lethal of them all, based on what she‘d seen of him when they‘d met for the first—and last—time a few months ago. She‘d never encountered such cold apathy as she had in Tegan. He was a killing machine, according to all who knew his name, and Elise didn‘t doubt it for a second. And now that she‘d been discovered in the city, she could only hope that the warrior would take no interest in what she was doing. She couldn‘t allow herself to be pushed back into the Darkhavens, not even by a male as fearsome as Tegan.

Elise ran the last block to her apartment and raced up the concrete steps. The main door used to be keyed access, but someone broke the lock five weeks ago and the building super hadn‘t gotten around to fixing it yet. Elise pushed the door open and dashed down the first floor hallway to her unit. She unlocked the deadbolt and slipped inside, immediately flipping on all the lights.

The stereo and television went on next—neither tuned to anything in particular, but both playing loudly. No longer needing the MP3 player she wore on her hunt that day, Elise pulled it off and set it down on the chipped yellow kitchen counter, along with the dead Minion‘s cell phone. She ditched her ruined parka on the floor next to her treadmill, her stomach turning as the bare bulb hanging from the combination dining-living room ceiling washed over the dark red stains from the Minion‘s blood. It was on her hands too; her fingers were sticky with gore.

And her head was still pounding, the usual vicious migraine that came in the wake of any prolonged period of using her skill. It wasn‘t as bad as it would be soon. She still had time to clean up and try to get herself to bed before the worst of it hit her.

Elise dragged herself into the bathroom and turned on the shower. Her fingers were trembling as she unfastened the empty leather knife sheath from her thigh and placed it on the sink. She‘d lost the titanium blade in the snow when the Rogue kicked it out of her grasp, but she had others. A lot of the money she‘d left the Darkhavens with had gone into weapons and training equipment—things she had never wanted to know anything about but now considered necessities. How drastically her life had changed in just four months. She could never go back to what she was.

The person she had been all the time she‘d lived under the protection of the Breed was gone now, dead, like her beloved mate and her son. The pain of those losses had been a furnace that devoured her old life, reduced it to cinder. She was what was left—the phoenix that rose out of the ash. Elise glanced up into the fogging mirror and met her own haunted gaze in the glass. Blood smeared her cheek and chin, grime smudged her brow, all of it like war paint. There was a feral glint in the weary eyes staring back at her.

God, she was tired... so tired. But so long as she could stand, she could fight. So long as her heart still ached for vengeance, she would use the psychic gift that had for so long been her greatest weakness. She would endure any hardship, face any risk. Whatever it took to have justice.

Tegan wiped his bloodied blade on the dead Rogue‘s jacket and idly observed the swift disintegration of the last body in the alley. He blew out a curse, his senses still quivering with the heat of combat. Battle-sharpened eyes lit on the knife Elise had lost in her struggle. Tegan walked over and retrieved the weapon, which was not some dainty dagger a lady might carry for protection but a serious-looking bit of hardware. It was seven inches long, serrated near the upward jut of the tip, and unless he missed his guess, the metal was not your basic carbide steel but Rogue-eating titanium. Which only begged the question again: What the hell was the Darkhaven female doing out on the streets alone, covered in blood, and toting warriorgrade weapons on her person?

Tegan lifted his head and sniffed at the air, searching for her scent. It didn‘t take long to find it. His senses were always sharp, predatorily acute; combat lit them up like Roman candles. He pulled the heather-and-roses scent of the Breedmate into his lungs, and let it guide him deeper into the city. The scent trailed off at a shit-hole apartment building in one of the seedier sections of the lowrent area of town. Not at all the kind of place he‘d expect to find a genteel Darkhaven-raised female like Elise. But she was inside the graffiti-tagged, brick-and-concrete eyesore, he was certain of that. He stalked up the steps and scowled at the feeble door with its broken lock. Inside the vestibule a battered wooden staircase rose to the left, but Elise‘s scent was coming from the door at the end of the first-floor hall. Tegan crept past another apartment door on his right, the thump of music vibrating the floor and walls. He could hear a television too, a barrage of background noise that seemed to swell as he neared Elise‘s place. He rapped on the door and waited.

No response.

He knocked again, dropping his knuckles hard on the scarred metal. Nothing. Not that she could hear anything inside the place with all the racket going on in there.

Maybe he shouldn‘t be there, shouldn‘t get involved in whatever it was that brought the female to this place in her life. Tegan knew she‘d had a rough time since the death of her son. Already widowed some five years, Elise had been devastated when her only child went missing and was later found to have gone Rogue. The Order had gotten word that Camden was dead, killed by Elise‘s brother-in-law, Sterling Chase, when the kid showed up at the Darkhaven in full-on Bloodlust. The report stated that Camden had been about to attack Elise when Chase gunned him down with titanium rounds—right in front of her.

God only knew what witnessing her son‘s death might have done to Elise. Not his concern, though. Yeah, not his fucking problem at all. So why was he standing in this rank tenement house with his dick in his hand, waiting for her to come around and let him in?

Tegan eyed the array of locks on the apartment door. At least these were in working order and she‘d had the good sense to set them once she got inside. But for a Breed vampire of Tegan‘s power and lineage, tripping the locks with his mind took all of two seconds.

He slipped inside and closed the door behind him. The decibel level in the small studio apartment was enough to make his head shatter. He glanced around the place with narrowed eyes, taking in the odd decor. The only furniture was a futon and a bookcase, which housed a quality stereo system and a small flat-panel television—

both on, and blaring.

Next to the futon, in a space that might have held a table and chairs, were a treadmill and a resistance training machine. Elise‘s blood-stained parka lay on the floor there, and on the sorry-looking yellow kitchen counter were a cell phone and an MP3

player. Elise‘s decorating style left a lot to be desired, but it was her choice of wall covering that Tegan found most peculiar.

Crudely nailed to all four walls of the one-room living space were acoustic foam panels—

soundproofing material. Yards of the stuff, covering every square inch of the walls and the back of the door, too. ―What the fu—‖

In the adjacent bathroom, there was a metallic squeak as the shower abruptly cut off. Tegan turned to face the door as it opened a moment later. Elise was pulling a white terrycloth robe around herself as she glanced up, met his gaze, and gasped.

―Tegan.‖ Her voice was barely audible over the din of the music and TV. She made no move to turn them down, just came out of the bathroom and stood as far away from him as possible. ―What are you doing here?‖

―I could ask you the same thing.‖ Tegan let his eyes drift around the meager living quarters, if only to quit looking at her in her state of near-undress.

―Shitty place you have here. Who‘s your decorator?‖

She didn‘t answer him. Her pale amethyst eyes stayed fixed on him as though she didn‘t quite trust him, nervous to find herself alone with him. And who could blame her? Tegan knew he had the reputation of a stone cold killer. It was simply fact. But the last time he‘d seen Elise, he‘d shown her nothing

but

kindness,

deference

paid

the

Darkhaven female out of respect for what she was going through. It hadn‘t hurt that she was a breathtaking beauty, as fragile as a frost flower. Some of that fragility was gone now, Tegan noted, seeing the lines of muscle definition in her bare calves and arms. Her face was still lovely, but not as full as he remembered. Her eyes were still alive with intelligence but their sheen was somehow brittle, a characteristic made more pronounced by the trace shadows beneath her lashes.

And her hair... Jesus, she‘d shorn off the long blond waves. The cascade of spun gold that used to fall to her hips was now a crown of thick silky spikes that rose around her head in pixie-like disarray, and framed the lean oval of her face. She was still stunning, but in an entirely different way than Tegan ever would have imagined.

―You forgot something back in the alley.‖ He held out the wicked hunting blade. When she moved to take it from him, he drew it back out of her reach. ―What were you doing out there tonight, Elise?‖

She shook her head, said something too softly to be heard over the din filling the apartment. Impatient, Tegan mentally shut the stereo down. He glanced to the television, about to silence that device as well.

―No!‖ Elise shook her head, wincing, her fingers clutching her temple. ―Wait—leave it on, please. I need... the noise soothes me.‖

Tegan scowled his doubt, but left the TV alone.

―What happened to you tonight, Elise? Did someone hurt you out there? Were you attacked before the Rogues discovered you in the alley?‖

Her answer seemed long in coming. ―No. I wasn‘t attacked.‖

―You want to explain all that blood on your coat over there? Or why you‘re living in a part of town where you feel the need to carry around this kind of hardware?‖

She held her head in her hands, her voice a rough whisper. ―I don‘t want to explain anything. Please, Tegan. I wish you hadn‘t come here. Just, please... you have to leave now.‖

He exhaled a sharp laugh. ―I just saved your sweet little ass, darlin‘. I don‘t think it‘s too much to ask that you tell me why I had to.‖

―I didn‘t mean to be out past dark. I know the dangers. Things just took... a little longer than I anticipated.‖

―Things,‖ he repeated, not liking where this seemed to be heading. ―We‘re not talking about shopping or coffee with friends, are we?‖

Tegan‘s gaze went back to the kitchen counter, to the familiar design of the cell phone that lay there. He scowled, suspicion coiling in his gut as he walked over and picked it up. He‘d seen dozens of these things lately. The phone was one of those disposable jobs, the kind favored by humans in league with the Rogues. He flipped it over and disabled the built-in GPS chip.

Tegan knew if he took the cell phone in to the compound lab, Gideon would find it contained just one number, super-encrypted and impossible to break. This particular phone was spattered with human blood, the same shit that soaked the front of Elise‘s coat. ―Where‘d you get this, Elise?‖

―I think you know,‖ she replied, her voice quiet but defiant.

He turned to face her. ―You took it off a Minion?

By yourself? Jesus Christ... how?‖

She shrugged, still rubbing the side of her head as if it pained her. ―I tracked him from the train station. I followed him, and when the chance was there, I killed him.‖

It wasn‘t often that Tegan was taken by surprise, but hearing those words coming out of the petite female hit him like a brick to the back of his head.