Love Bites (21 page)

W
hen Jim Decker walked into Bottoms Up that night, you could almost taste the testosterone. Or vamposterone. Or whatever.

Decker worked his way through the Saturday night crowd toward our table, attracted either by me or the opportunity to yank Beau Gabriel’s chain. The two had hated one another since Deck’s vampire slayer days; the fact that I’d since made him one of us hadn’t blunted the hostility. In fact, it had probably made it worse, because now they competed over me.

Beau had made me a vampire two memorable years ago. He’d read
Shadowmaster
, one of the string of vamp horror novels I’d written as Amanda Carlton, and decided I needed a bit more . . . research. I hadn’t minded a bit. He’d seemed the cowboy embodiment of all my demon lover fantasies, like a cross between Dracula and a young Clint Eastwood, and I’d fallen for him hard.

I also found myself sharing his enemies, particularly Jim Decker, who in those days had been on a mission to avenge the sister he thought Beau had seduced and misused. Knowing Beau’s effect on women, it probably hadn’t taken much seduction, and no misuse had been involved. But big brothers need their illusions.

One night I’d been caught in the crossfire of one of their battles, and Decker ended up capturing me. To save myself from a staking, I’d tempted him into sex. Making him my blood lover had taught him we weren’t the undead murderers he’d believed, but in the process, I’d become a lot more emotionally involved with him than Beau liked.

But really, it was inevitable that I’d be attracted to Decker. He had far more going for him than AB negative, no matter what Beau thought. I enjoyed his intelligence and sense of honor and deep love of everything female, not to mention the fierce sensuality that made him such a glorious lover.

Besides, I’ve always had a thing for big men, and like Beau, Decker qualified. Six-foot-four and powerfully muscled, he had broad bull shoulders, narrow hips, and the rippling musculature of a professional athlete. Even better, his was one of those sensual, hawkish faces that make women think of rough, fast, really good sex. Yet his lips looked like God had designed them for slow kisses in the moonlight.

Now, watching him saunter toward us on those long legs, I swallowed, remembering what it felt like to fist both hands in the black silk of his hair while he used that mouth to drive me mad.

As long as Deck had been merely human, Beau could tolerate the relationship by pretending the other man was nothing more to me than a blood supply. But when I’d decided to make him a vampire, Beau had been furious. So furious, I’d had no choice except to cool off the relationship with Deck or risk losing my demon lover.

As Decker stopped beside our table, his hot blue eyes swept over me in a hungry stare that spoke of longing and frustration. Today he wore a pair of beige slacks and a cream Oxford cloth shirt, tie loosely knotted, with a dark brown trench coat that reminded me of a film noir detective. “Amanda,” he purred. His gaze flicked to Beau and cooled. “Gabriel.”

Of the two men, Decker looked more like a vampire with those dark, European good looks, while Beau was blond and all-American, with broad, high cheekbones, a narrow nose, and a flashing grin. One look at that face, and you pictured him taking his best girl to a square dance. Which wasn’t that far off, except that afterward he’d bend her over the trunk of his T-Bird and fuck her to a screaming orgasm, burying his fangs in her throat just as she came.

God knew he’d done it to me often enough.

“Deck,” Beau drawled, a chilly smile stretching over that Sundance Kid face. With one forefinger, he pushed up the brim of his black Stetson. “Screw any werewolves lately?”

Ignoring that sally, Decker lifted a brow at him, pointedly scanning Beau’s black Levis and western shirt. “The
Urban Cowboy
thing went out thirty years ago. Or hadn’t you noticed?”

“Hell, after the first century or so, all the decades blur together.” Beau crossed his cowboy-booted ankles and laced his big hands on his flat, muscled belly. “Anyway, urban I ain’t.”

Ah, no. Beau had actually
been
a cowboy, back 120 years ago. At least until he met a certain vampire dance hall girl who decided he looked tasty.

Decker opened his mouth, but before he could get down to some serious slander, a female voice interrupted.

“Oh, Jim! Thank God!” A pretty brunette shot through the bar’s front door and across the length of the room to fling herself into Decker’s arms. He caught her, and I felt a wave of jealousy at his utter lack of reluctance to find his hands full of overenthusiastic bimbo.

Then I made out what she was babbling and felt a little more sympathetic.

“God, Decker, don’t let him do it to me again!” she gasped, her voice soggy with threatening tears as she clung to his big body like Spanish moss draping an oak. “I couldn’t stand going through that again—and not being able to break the spell . . . ! Oh, please! You’ve got to help me!”

He stroked a hand through her hair as she quivered. “Calm down, Lynn. What’s going on?”

“It’s Jeffrey!” Lynn wailed. “He said if I don’t go to his house and agree to—he said he’s going to turn me back into a werewolf. Permanently!”

Well,
that
stopped conversation for a radius of about thirty feet. In the ensuing dead silence, I eyed the sobbing girl’s back. “Maybe we should go somewhere else and discuss this.”

“Oh, yeah, let’s,” murmured Beau. “My curiosity is killing me.”

So we all trooped out of the bar and around the corner out into the parking lot. The other customers stared at us avidly as we left. Beau wasn’t the only one dying to know what was going on.

I already knew part of the story. Right after Decker had become a vampire, he’d picked Lynn up in a bar, planning to fuck her brains out and sip a pint or so she’d never miss. But she had an even bigger surprise in store for him; as the full moon rose, she’d turned into a werewolf and pounced on him.

Deck, naturally enough, thought she was trying to kill him, and the result was a nasty little brawl. Eventually she managed to communicate that all she wanted was some of
his
bodily fluids; she’d been cursed by a wizard, and the only way to break the spell was find a man to make love to her while she was in werewolf form. He’d happily cooperated, and Lynn no longer had to dread moon rise.

Only now it seemed the wizard in question wasn’t happy. And that could be a problem, because Jeffrey Copperstone wasn’t the kind of man a wise woman wanted to piss off. He’d cursed Lynn in the first place because she wouldn’t put out after he’d met her through a computer dating service. Now he was evidently at it again.

Some guys just don’t know how to take no for an answer.

Out in the parking lot, we listened as she blurted out the new twist on her tale. Copperstone had been furious when he’d discovered Decker had broken the spell, but she’d made herself so scarce he’d been unable to retaliate. She’d even quit her job and moved to another city. But he’d eventually tracked her down anyway and started harassing and stalking her again. Yesterday he’d given her an ultimatum; return to Atlanta and present herself at his house the next evening prepared to give him what he wanted, or become permanently fuzzy. Fearing what the psychotic bastard would do to her one way or another, Lynn had wisely decided to hit all Decker’s favorite haunts in hopes he could save her again.

While she quavered her way through her story, I kept an eye on Decker’s face. He’d always had a chivalric streak, and I wasn’t surprised to see that Copperstone’s behavior royally pissed him off. His blue eyes began to spark and burn with vampire fire, and his fangs lengthened, all signs of one of us on a tear.

“Go on home, Lynn,” he told her, as she burst into tears at the end of her story. “I’ll take care of it.”

“But he’s a really powerful wizard, Jim! What if he does something to you?” She sniffed. I dragged a tissue out of my purse and handed it to her. She took it with watery thanks and blew her nose. “Maybe . . . Maybe I should just give him what he wants. Maybe he’ll be satisfied if I just. . . .”

“Guys like that are never satisfied,” I told her. “If he’s this abusive now, what’s he going to be like later?”

“Do what Decker says, Lynn,” Beau said. “We’ll take care of him.”

At first I was a little surprised that he’d offer to help Decker out with anything, but on second thought, I should have expected it. Fangs notwithstanding, Beau had a very old-fashioned sense of the proper treatment of women, so it was only natural that he wanted to give Copperstone a badly needed lesson in manners.

Decker, oddly enough, didn’t protest. He just gave us a grin that glittered in the moonlight. “Looks like we’re off to see the wizard.”

Beau’s return grin looked more like a wolf’s bared fangs. “To rip out his fucking throat.”

Having both of them that ticked off didn’t bode well for Copperstone. So why did I feel something icy creep down my spine? “How?” I asked. “Like Lynn said, this guy is pretty powerful. What’s to keep him from putting a whammy on us?”

Beau’s green eyes narrowed. “Me. I haven’t been a vampire for one hundred and fifty years for nothing. By the time I get through using my psi on that bastard, he won’t be able to pull a rabbit out of a hat.”

I certainly hoped not anyway.

*   *   *

C
opperstone’s house was located in an Atlanta suburb that must have been truly the sticks when the house was built. We parked Beau’s T-Bird a mile away and slunk the rest of the way in the dark, vampire quiet. Sometimes I wish I really could turn into a bat.

Eyeing the sprawling two-story Victorian as we approached, I snorted softly. “Being a college professor must pay better than I thought.”

“Actually, Lynn said Copperstone told her the house has been in his family since it was built,” Decker said, his voice so soft a human couldn’t have heard it. “Evidently they’re old money.”

Beau curled his lip. “Carpetbagger.” Catching Decker’s questioning look, he shrugged. “With a name like Copperstone, his people must be Yankees.”

Yeah, three or four generations ago. Then again, to a man who’d fought in the Civil War, that was yesterday.

We split up to circle the house, using vampire senses to determine how many people were inside and what security arrangements Copperstone had. My attention was caught by the garden in the back—not flowers or vegetables, but neat rows of strange little plants, the majority of which I didn’t know the name of. I wondered if he used them to cast spells.

He also had a pen full of goats and a chicken coop. Since Copperstone didn’t strike me as the kind of man with an interest in animal husbandry, I started picturing blood sacrifices under a full moon. Which could just be my overactive writer’s imagination, but somehow I didn’t think so.

I met the boys on the other side of the house in the deep night shadows where no human eye would be able to see us. “He’s upstairs in the attic, and he’s alone,” Decker said.

“Doesn’t seem much worried about security.” Beau frowned. “He’s got no alarm system. Hell, the front door is unlocked.”

“For Lynn, probably,” I said. “The bastard doesn’t expect her to stand him up.”

I knew we were all thinking the same thing:
it couldn’t be this easy
. This guy was a wizard. Either he was stupidly overconfident, or he had good reason to believe he could handle anything that came at him.

We looked at each other and shared a simultaneous shrug. It really didn’t matter. We were committed to this. We were, in fact, probably the only ones who could stop this creep from abusing Lynn or anybody else he wanted. Assuming Beau was right, and his psi was stronger than the bastard’s magic.

What the fuck. We had to try.

So together, moving with the speed and utter silence only our kind can manage, we headed up the porch stairs, through that unlocked door, and into the house.

*   *   *

C
opperstone’s decorating taste ran to Victorian kitsch—here a stool shaped like an elephant, there a lamp with long silk fringe around the shade, over there a tiger skin on the floor. All dark and tacky and ugly as hell. I was just as glad I had no more than a glance around the front room as I climbed the sweeping staircase at the boys’ heels, heading for the source of the low chanting.

But when we hit the top of the staircase, we could still hear that voice coming from the ceiling over our heads. Decker glanced at Beau. “Must be another set of stairs somewhere.”

I grimaced. “Probably behind a hidden panel.”

I was right. It was in Copperstone’s bedroom, set in one wall and camouflaged behind ugly flocked velvet cabbage rose wallpaper. Beau found the trigger to open the hidden door by zeroing in on the scent left by Copperstone’s fingers.

While he sniffed the wall looking for it, my appalled eyes locked on the huge painting hanging over Copperstone’s king-sized bed. It depicted some Roman emperor and a dozen well-hung Praetorian guards doing anatomically unlikely things to three naked female captives.

His attention caught by my revolted stare, Decker looked at the painting and sneered. “Little prick seems to like the idea of using force, doesn’t he?”