To Kill An Angel (18 page)

He led the way down the hall to the den area just off the kitchen, what he’d referred to as the living room.  As we trailed him, I could plainly smell his growing desire.  It made his blood smell sweet and musky.  My body’s response was the burning in my throat and on my tongue and the extension of my fangs.

By the time Cade had stopped in front of the sofa and stretched out full length upon it, I was having trouble controlling my urges and my thoughts.  As I eyed the heavy pulse in Cade’s throat, I was nearly consumed by the remembered taste of his rich blood on my lips.

“Ridley!” Bo called sharply, grabbing my arm to restrain me from going after Cade right away.  “Focus.  Remember what you’re trying to find out.  Focus on Devon.”

Although his voice penetrated the all-consuming throb of Cade’s heartbeat as it rang in my ears, I had to struggle to assimilate what he’d said and make the necessary adjustments.  When I’d managed to form a couple of coherent thoughts, I turned and nodded to Bo.  Reluctantly, he released my arm, allowing me to approach Cade.

As I knelt in the floor, crouching in front of him, I glanced up at Cade’s face.  It was etched with a blatant desire that only exacerbated the trouble I was having concentrating.  Thus far, feeding had been so thoroughly comingled with sexual passion I wasn’t quite sure how to separate them now.  And though Cade was no Bo, I felt his desire for me like a tangible thing.

“Do it,” Cade croaked, his voice thick with his own kind of need and want. 

His heartbeat had quickened and his breath came in short huffs as he panted with anticipation.

Right before I drove my teeth into Cade’s throat, I heard the angry hiss of Bo’s breath through his teeth.  It was followed by the frustrated stomp of his feet as he paced behind me, an animal caged by his situational impotence.  There was nothing he could do and he knew it.

That was my last thought for a few mindlessly satisfying moments.  When Cade’s blood squirted from his artery and coated my tongue with warm, sticky sweetness, I lost all thought of anything or anyone else.  I pulled the heavenly fluid into my mouth in great gulps, reveling in the feel of it sliding down my throat, putting out the flames of my need.

At first, I thought nothing of strong arms coming around me and hauling me up onto a hard chest, of wide hands roaming my back and burying themselves in my hair.  But then, a face drifted through my mind.  It was Bo’s.  In my mind’s eye, I could see the hurt on his face, the discomfort of having to watch me so intimately embraced by another man.  And enjoying it, no less! 

It was that realization, that shocking and painful thought that drew the curtain back from my mind and opened it up to clarity of purpose.  Shifting atop Cade, I let my legs fall until my knees hit the floor again and I focused all my attention on sifting through a fuzzy mountain of images for the familiar face of my friend.

 Finally, I saw Sebastian and Heather.  They were standing in front of a dirt wall, staring at something.  There was a lantern hanging from a hook buried in a wooden support beam to the left of Sebastian’s head and I could make out the hint of a shimmer in the dim light.  There were several stakes emerging from different points in the vague shape, from what would’ve been shoulders and thighs I imagined. 

A horrifying image from my own memory overwhelmed the picture for an instant.  It was the picture of Bo, staked by Sebastian himself, hanging helplessly in just such a position only one floor above where I knelt in the floor.

Before I could get lost in the demons from my own mind, voices brought my attention back to the scene from Cade’s blood.  Sebastian and Heather were walking away. 

They made their way through what looked like a mine shaft, replete with dirt walls and floor, and Y-shaped support beams spaced evenly along the length of the earthen tube.

“We’ll keep him here until we find the other blood elements that
I need,” Sebastian said.

“If you’ll tell me what they are,
who
they are, I’ll help you find them.”

Sebastian stopped, turning to Heather in the darkness.  He rubbed his thumb in an arc from her temple to the corner of her mouth and he smiled.  The gesture was a bewitching curl of his lips that gave me chills as if someone had just walked over my grave. 

“Oh, my dear, even your presence here has helped me more than you know.”

Heather looked radiant in the face of his compliment, but there was a light in Sebastian’s eyes that gave me the impression that he meant something far more than Heather understood.

Hands pulling gently at my shoulders brought me back to Sebastian’s living room.  Someone was tugging at me, calling my name.  It was Bo.

“Ridley, that’s enough.  He’s getting faint,” he was saying.

With a start, I withdrew my teeth and leaned up to look into Cade’s face.  His eyes were closed and he was chalky white beneath his tan.  I tapped my fingers lightly on his cheek and softly called his name.

“Cade.”  No response.  Again, I tapped.  “Cade.”  Still no answer, so I slapped my palm lightly against his firm cheek.  “Cade!”

Drunkenly, Cade rolled his head, turning his face toward the ceiling.  He smiled once without opening his eyes and then his head dropped off to the other side.

“He’ll be fine,” Bo said.  “He just needs to rest.”  Wrapping his fingers around my upper arm, Bo urged me to stand.  Once on my feet, I turned toward him and he used the backs of his fingers to wipe my mouth.  “What did you see?”

“I saw Sebastian and Heather.  They’re holding Devon in some sort of abandoned mine I think.  He’s staked to the wall, like you were upstairs.”  I couldn’t quell the shudder that racked my body.

“Did you see them leave?  Do you know where it is?”

I shook my head.

“No.”

Although Bo looked a bit disappointed, he quickly moved past it.

“That’s alright.  It just so happens that we have a source who knows the woods like the back of his hand.  If there’s a mine shaft out there, Lucius will know where it is.”  One side of Bo’s mouth lifted in a lop-sided grin.  “You did good, baby.”

His words ran through me like warm sunshine coursing through my veins.  We looked into each other’s eyes for several seconds in one of those great romantic moments before Bo started to frown.  Before I could ask what was bothering him, his frown deepened, instantly bringing all my senses to high alert. 

Slowly, Bo raised his hand and traced the skin of my cheek with his fingertips then lightly brushed them over my jaw and down my throat.  He pushed my hair back over my shoulder and spread the neckline of my shirt, examining my chest.  As he did, I could feel my skin tingle a little, almost prickle.

Abruptly and wordlessly, Bo reached down, took my hand and led me from the room.  When I saw that he was leading me to our room, I found my tongue.

“Bo what is it?  What’s wrong?”

Still, he said nothing, merely hurried me through the bedroom door and closed it behind us.  Finally, he turned to me and spoke.

“I need you to take off your shirt.”

Even though the circumstances were alarming, a twitter of excitement fluttered in my stomach.  Without questioning him again, I reached for the hem of my shirt and pulled it over my head.

Bo stepped toward me and leaned in, his face so close that I could feel his warm breath on my skin, caressing me like the delicate wings of a butterfly.  Once again, he raised his hand and dragged his fingertips over my neck and chest.

I looked down to see what had captured his attention so completely, but I saw nothing.  At first.  It wasn’t until Bo shifted, allowing the low light to play across my skin in a different way that I saw the iridescent sheen.

Even upside down, I could see that the shapes were familiar to me.  Cast in pearly, barely-glistening strokes, if Bo hadn’t been looking so pointedly at them, I’d probably never have seen them.  They were that faint.  But I had caught a glimpse of them.  And I recognized them.  They looked like the symbols I’d seen in the book in Sebastian’s office.

Relief washed through me, relief of the doubts I’d secretly been harboring about being the one fated for Bo.  But as I watched Bo carefully trace each shape with the tip of his finger, those doubts melted away like ice on hot pavement.  I was made for Bo, made by God Himself to be his mate.  I was the one person on earth who could help him fulfill his destiny and, even though his destiny would likely rip from our grasp an eternity together, I could live forever knowing that we’d had this perfect love for just a little while.

“What does it mean?” I finally asked.

“It must be part of the letter.  It’s like a laundry list of people—The Corrupted Child, born into evil; The Reluctant Vampire, followed by death and yet refusing to succumb; The Bereaved Child, grief-stricken and betrayed; The First Fallen One, the only blood given willingly; The One Not Chosen, turned bitter with envy; and The Doomed Key.”

“But what does it all mean?”

“Well, if it is part of the letter, which according to Cade it is, then maybe these are people Sebastian needs in order to be able to kill me.  Maybe he needs the blood of these people—or their lives—as a sacrifice.  I just don’t know.”

“How are we ever supposed to make sense of anything like this?  How are we supposed to know what to do with the information I’m learning?”

“I don’t know.  Maybe it will appear soon.”

“Do you think this has anything to do with Devon since it was him that they took?”

“I think we have to assume that it does.”

“Could he be one of the people listed?”

Bo looked thoughtfully at the things only he could decipher from the beautiful markings on my skin.

“I guess he could be the Reluctant Vampire.  He refuses to feed, which means that it should only be a matter of time before he dies.  I guess you could say that death follows him.”

“How could Sebastian have known that he’d find just such a person here, in this town where both of us live?  Isn’t that too much of a coincidence?”

Bo straightened, his eyes burning into mine.

“It’s no coincidence.  This is fate,” he said intensely.  “None of this is an accident.”

“So what do we do now?”

Bo took the tee shirt that dangled from my fingers, turned it right-side out and held it out to me.

“After you get dressed, we’ll go get Lucius and see if we can find Devon before morning.”

“But what if they come looking for him?”

“There’s no reason for them to go back there again, unless they have to keep another prisoner down there.  Besides, he’s invisible.  Maybe they won’t know he’s gone if I put all the stakes back where they were.”

Although I worried about Sebastian coming after Devon, I had to trust Bo.  This was his God-given job to do, his birthright and sole purpose for existence.  He had to have a wisdom that no one else could understand. 

So, after slipping my shirt back over my head, Bo and I headed back through the house toward the door.  Annika emerged from the den just as we were passing.

“I see Cade must’ve gotten a little taste of our fair Ridley, or rather she got a taste of him,” she said smugly.  “Looks like he’ll be sleeping it off for a while.  Did you find out anything useful?”

“Ridley saw that they were keeping a friend of ours in a mine shaft.”

“Where is it?”

“We don’t know the exact location, but we know someone who can probably help us.  We’re going to go start looking now.”

“Mind if I come?  I’m going to need to feed before too long and I can help you search.  You might need an extra hand.”

She couldn’t have been more casual, but I could see intent in her eyes that was anything but.  As usual, though, Bo was oblivious to what I believed were Annika’s conniving ways.