Lisa Renee Jones (8 page)

“No. No you are not-”

“Run,” Troy growled. “I have…to run it off.”

“Yes,” Kelly said from the kitchen. “We need an ambulance. It’s some sort of reaction to a drug we think-”

Aiden went completely still as realization hit him. Kelly was on the phone and this was not good news.

Aiden was in the kitchen in two seconds flat, grabbing the phone from her hand. “We don’t need an ambulance. My friend didn’t know that my brother has seizures. He’s recovering fine and we aren’t paying for an expensive ambulance ride he doesn’t need.” He answered a few questions and ended the call.

Kelly’s eyes went wide and she started to back away. “Aiden, that wasn’t a seizure. That was…I don’t know what that was but it wasn’t a seizure.”

He could wipe her memory. He could do it now, and the council would dictate he do so. But this was Kelly and he couldn’t undo a memory scrub or the damage to her trust if she ever found out. “We need to talk, Kelly.” And he needed to figure out what he was going to tell her.

A sound from the living room drew his attention and he cursed. Aiden ran toward the living room, arriving to find the sliding door open. Troy was gone. Emotions roared inside him. He couldn’t lose Troy.

He couldn’t.

“Aiden?”

Seconds passed while he forced the storm raging in him back down, knowing control was the only way to keep her safe. “I’ll pay for the damage,” he said, turning to her.

“I don’t care about the damage. I care that your brother is not only sick, but he might hurt someone.”

“He won’t,” Aiden said, knowing his brother, and hoping there was enough of Troy left to be true of that knowledge. “He’d kill himself before he’d hurt an innocent.”

“What the heck is going on Aiden? What aren’t you telling me?” He scrubbed his jaw and inhaled. “If I tell you, you’ll be in danger.”

“I’m already in danger.”

“You don’t understand. More danger. Much more.”

She curled her fingers by her side. “Make me understand. Damn it, Aiden, we just had unprotected sex, and that realization is freaking me out more and more by the second. I need to know what I’m into here.

What you’re into.”

“I can’t have children and I’m, well, I’m not like you Kelly. You can’t catch anything but a little piece of hell from me.”

She shook her head, her hands in the air. “What does that mean? Because if it was supposed to be comforting, it’s not. I just saw Troy morph into something out a monster movie, and I have a substance in my lab that’s the common denominator in six murders. If those two things are related, I need to know, and I need to know now.”

“It wasn’t Troy. He didn’t kill those women.”

“I want to believe you. I want to believe you more than you can imagine, but you have to explain this to me. You have to give me a logical answer for everything that’s going on here.” He realized then that she wasn’t going to let this go, and she was too smart to accept any foolish excuse of an explanation he might give her. He had to tell her the truth, and he’d have to scrub her memory later.

But the truth was all that could save them now.

“If I tell you,” he said, his chest tight with emotion, with the idea of telling her what he was. What he would always be, “you’ll think I’m crazy.”

“Try me.”

He walked to the sliding glass door.

“Aiden! Don’t you dare walk away!”

He pulled the door shut and turned to her. “I’m not going anywhere.” He motioned to the shredded couch.

“Let’s sit down.”

She shook her head. “I’ll stand.”

“Very well,” he said, using his superior speed to close the distance between them in a mere instant.

She gasped at the unexpected action, but he was already touching her, already reaching inside her mind, and playing back his history, letting her see who and what he was. Letting her see how it had happened.

Suddenly Kelly was in Aiden’s head, a different Aiden, a younger Aiden, though not in body. It was just a sense she had of him, a feeling. She gasped as she brought his face into view, as her eyes followed his.

And then she knew. This was the man before the pain of a lifetime, and she was watching it happen, watching the ache that filled him in present day be created in his past.

He stood over the bodies of three people she somehow knew they were his parents, his sister. Beside him were two men, his brothers, but Troy was different—dark haired, and without the edge he possessed now, without the darkness. There was just pain. His pain, and the other men, all three of them – she felt their pain as well. But it was Aiden’s suffering, his anger, his fury, that carved her inside out.

“Why!” Aiden shouted at the heaven above, dropping to his knees to hold the pale, lifeless body of his sister Anna. She was bloodless, drained dry by the monster that had killed hundreds in their village, that he and his brothers had been hunting.

“Well hello, my little pretties.”

Suddenly, out of nowhere, a woman with long raven hair, and extended fangs, appeared, blood dripping from her mouth. She wiped it. “I’m ready for desert and you three will be lovely.” Aiden pushed to his feet, drawing a long blade from the tan animal skin pants he wore. “Come and get me!”

“Come and get us,” Troy shouted, stepping to Aiden’s side, knife drawn.

“Run,” his older brother Evan shouted. “Run now!” He lunged to the front of Aiden and Troy, shouting,

“Come and get me witch!”

“No!” Aiden shouted, knowing his brother had just ensured his death, knowing one man against this monster could not survive an attack. But it was too late. Evan fell at Aiden and Troy’s feet, his throat ripped open.

Aiden charged at the monster, aware that Troy was by him, that Troy’s blade sliced at her as his did. She moved too fast though, and was behind them in seconds. Pain sliced through his neck, his shoulder and everything went blank. Time faded away into shadows, into screams for his family. Something coppery touched his lips and a sudden hunger ravished him. Desperately he drank of the substance. Slowly, he became aware of the impossible, of Evan leaning over him, of his mouth on his brother’s arm. He was drinking…blood. Aiden scrambled away from the mirage, the trickery that must be that of the monster, to see Evan standing well and strong, alive.

“Evan?”

“Yes,” his brother said. “It’s me.”

Wildly, his gaze searched the area in front of their family cabin, finding the dead bodies of his family and a leather clad blonde man leaned over Troy, dripping blood into his mouth.

“The monster is dead.”

Troy came awake suddenly, shouting and scrambling backwards as well. The blonde man stood up, moving to stand beside Evan. “What Evan means is that the vampire is dead. I killed it and I can teach you how to hunt and kill others like it.”

Kelly came back to her own mind for a mere instant before an onslaught of images overtook her. The brothers fighting together, side by side, driven to save lives, to kill monsters. And then…then there was Aiden running towards Troy in a dark alley, desperate to get to his brother before the wolf did. The wolf.

Oh God, a werewolf. Suddenly she was standing over Aiden where he knelt on the ground, holding Troy, feeding his brother his own blood. The pain, the anger, the fury, of the day he’d lost his parents and sister, blasting into Aiden, and bleeding into her. Bleeding like Troy’s throat.

Kelly blinked the room into focus, gasping. She sat up, realizing that she was somehow on the ripped couch, with Aiden beside her. She stared at him, searched his face, thinking of the pain in him when he’d held his sister’s body, the fear when he’d known Evan would be killed.

“I…I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what I just saw. I mean…I do, but Aiden-”

“I’m sorry,” he said softly. His hand was on her legs, where they were draped across his lap, and though he touched her, she could feel him withdrawing from her as he spoke. “Feeding memories to someone isn’t an exact science. I didn’t mean for you to see Troy’s attack. It’s clearly front and center in my mind right now after what happened to him tonight.”

“Memories,” she repeated. “You fed me your memories?”

He nodded. “Yes.”

“What…are you?”

“A Warden,” he said without emotion, without hesitation, but she could feel the waves of tension rolling off of him. “The law of our kind.”

“Your kind,” she said, because she couldn’t bring herself to voice the word ‘vampire’.

“Yes,” he said. “My kind. Vampire, Kelly.” There it was. He’d said the impossible, said what her mind rejected despite what she’d seen – no – what she’d felt, what she’d relived with Aiden.

He lifted her legs and tried to scoot away from her and get up.

“No,” she said, grabbing his bare arm. He was still gloriously shirtless, his jeans unbuttoned, and all the confusion and fear over this night didn’t change how masculine and perfect she found him. That had to mean something, had to be a part of her that still saw him, as Aiden, her lover, her protector.

“Kelly-”

“Don’t tell me to let you go.” She dropped her legs to the floor, so she could follow him if necessary. “I just need to understand all of this, Aiden. How can you be what you say you are? How is that possible?” He turned to her more fully, his eyes, too black and unnatural, she realized now, found hers. “The laws of my race dictate that no human be left with a memory of our existence. I’ll tell you what you want to know, because it’s the best way to protect you. But when this is over, I will erase your memories, Kelly.

To do otherwise, is punishable by death - yours and mine.” She drew a sharp breath, but she wasn’t sure she could even process the implications of what he was saying. Not until she understood more of what was happening, of what he was.

“Okay,” she said. “So you’ll erase my memories, just like you gave me yours. Agreed. So now you’ll answer my questions?”

He hesitated and then gave a short nod.

“You eat real food. And today you were with me during the daytime, when there was sunlight.”

“I’m a vampire,” he said flatly. “Not a myth or a movie. I don’t burst into flames in sunlight and blood is a necessity on a limited basis. It becomes a drug, a high, that is not so unlike human drugs. It turns the abusers into the monsters I hunt down and kill.”

“And exactly how does one become a vampire?” she asked, because thinking of the science, the questions, seeking answers, was all that was keeping her sane right now.

He studied her a long moment, then, “I’d spare you the details but considering your career choice, I’m going to assume you can handle it. A human must be drained dry of their own blood and then fed that of a vampire. Other than that – where did we come from? I don’t know. No one knows our true origins.” She inhaled and let it out, still seeking answers, and mentally seeking the cold dark place in her mind that allowed her to separate herself from the horrors of her work. “And the animal – the wolf – that attacked Troy? Where does it, or they, come from?”

“A werewolf can be born, as most are, a race of their own, not so unlike humans. Or a wolf can be created by a virus that infects a human. The virus creates a monster, a creature that lives to kill. That is what Andres is. A wolf that was once human.”

Her chest went icy. “So you think this Andres killed those women?”

“There is no tidy death when a wolf attacks you, so no. I don’t think he killed them, but Troy has informants that say Andres is the creator of the drug that’s indirectly responsible for the deaths. We believe it’s a combination of his blood and that of a vampire. And Andres, like the wolf that attacked Troy, is a new breed of wolf, not fully understood. We don’t know exactly what he is and we have no blood samples available. Troy’s informant tells us that the result of the two blood types is an extreme aphrodisiac, and by extreme, I mean without pleasure there is pain. Horrible, intolerable pain. The vamps dose the human, and then Gangbang her.”

She could feel the blood drain from her face. “And they drain her dry and kill her during sex?”

“I’m not going to tell you that sex and blood are not one and the same for a vampire. It’s erotic and the vampires would drink from the female. And no, I didn’t drink from you, and not because I didn’t want to.

That’s my point. Vampires have willpower unless we have bloodlust. A vampire with bloodlust would not tidy up after themselves and the victims were not visibly injured. Troy’s source tells him some of the women stroke out from the drug and the vamps go ahead and drain them.”

“I didn’t see any signs of stroke,” she said, still reeling from his reference to not drinking from her, to the flashes of them naked and making love, to his mouth on her neck. To moments when his teeth had graved the delicate skin. She shook off the memories, tried to focus on what was most important. The dead women. The possibility of more dead women. “But I’ll look again. I’ll look more specifically.”

“It could simply be what you suggested,” he said. “A group of vampires misjudged how much blood they took from one human and overindulged. Either way, the drug is dangerous and the source, Andres, has to be destroyed.”

“Right,” she said, her throat closing, the calm place in her mind exploding with the horror of vampires draining innocent women dry.

Aiden scrubbed his jaw and she sensed that he was about to put distance between them, sensed that he thought she believed him to be a monster. She knew this because his memories, and his feelings, were hers now. She owned a part of them. Suddenly, she was aware of what it had cost him to show her what he had – to expose himself, to let her see his pain, feel his pain. Instinct was all she had, and that instinct had told her from the moment she’d met him, that he was someone she could trust…maybe even someone she could love.

She didn’t give herself time to think. Kelly grabbed him and pushed him back against the couch, climbing on top of him, her hand settling on his chest. “I know you aren’t one of those monsters, Aiden. I can’t pretend I’m not freaked out. Make that really freaked out. I just don’t know how else to put it. And yes, I’m scared, but not of you.” She reached for his face and he shackled her wrist.