Текст книги "Blood Kiss"

Автор книги: J. R. Ward

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Would Craeg even be comfortable here?

Probably not.

“Father?”

“Forgive me.” He looked down at the papers on his desk. “But of course, I understand you must needs be gone. Do know you are missed, however. Also know that the Brothers do not tell me much, yet what they have shared … makes me very, very proud of you.”

That now-familiar pain in her chest, the one that came from her lying, lit off again as she thought that actually, he would not be very proud of her at all.

She intended to lose her virginity tonight to a male he would never approve of.

The trouble was, the Brothers had given no indication of how long this training program would last or what the long-term prospects for the class sticking together were. And her need for Craeg’s body was making her desperate—and very conscious that time was passing with alacrity.

She wasn’t going to miss her chance. And she had the sense that the more they were together, the more Craeg’s priorities were changing, too. He was becoming attached to her.

Paradise could feel it.

If it weren’t for the omissions with her father, she would be on cloud nine.

“I’ll see you tomorrow night after class,” she said in a rough voice.

“I’ll be here. Do take care of yourself.”

“I will.” She nodded to him. “I promise, Father.”

Chapter Thirty-eight

Craeg couldn’t remember the last time he’d gone out with “friends.” In fact, he might never have done it before.

As he pulled on his jeans and cursed the holes, he told himself to get over it. He’d never been into “fashion”—one, he couldn’t have afforded it even if he had given a shit, and two, worrying about what you put on your body had always struck him as a criminal waste of brainpower.

“You look so incredibly average.”

Rolling his eyes, he turned around to Axe and—

“What the fuck are you wearing, asshole?”

The male looked like he’d been hit with the freak bat harder than usual, his big body wearing a shiny black skin suit that smelled like chemicals and made a strange creaking sound as he walked. Black piercings were in his ears and his face, a chain running from one lobe to his fucking nose, for crissakes.

He didn’t look like a pussy, though—Craeg had to give him that. Something about the bastard radiated aggression, power, strength. Sex.

Kinky sex, that was.

Axe shrugged like he was in nothing more unusual than a granhmen’s housecoat. “I’m going to hang out with my kind. If I don’t get laid my way soon, I’m going to kill myself—hell, much more of you vanilla types and I’m going to need Cialis to get it up. You’re killing my burn.”

“Well, no offense, but an open flame is not what you need around that getup.”

And out came the mask. It was black, of course, but like he’d expected something pink and green? And it fit over Axe’s features like a glove, changing his not-bad-looking-at-all face into something downright hideous—a morphing that was no longer vampire, but another species.

Alien.

“To think I assumed you were fugly before,” Craeg remarked.

“Again I say, you normals are killing me.”

Annnnnnnnnnnnnnd that was how he and a whatever-the-hell-it-was ended up riding out of the training center together.

As the bus went along, pausing at all those gates, they were both quiet, but he was damn sure they had the same things on their minds: Axe was clearly looking to get his freak all over some Goth variety of a heart-n’-a-hole, while Craeg was trying desperately to convince himself he could keep from losing control with Paradise.

Ostensibly, this whole meet-up-with-the-class thing shouldn’t have been a big deal—they were just going to a regular club, with music and booze. Nothing close to where Axe was heading, for sure.

But sex was going to be front and center, at least for him.

Shit, Paradise was killing him—and he’d identified the essential problem. Since the first night of the program, he’d set up barrier after barrier to keep her away, and each one of them had crumbled. It was like he was a mountain climber and had taken a fall—and every tethering of the rope that was there to save his life had popped, one after the other.

“You know, you look like shit, and not just because you’re wearing that ridiculous getup,” Axe muttered.

Craeg looked across the aisle. “I look ridiculous? Have you checked in the mirror? I didn’t know that crank case oil was a fashion statement.”

“Stop avoiding. What’s up, my man.”

As they trundled along, heading for the dematerialization spot, he found himself talking. “I can’t … You know, it’s not right.”

“What isn’t.”

“I can’t do it.”

“Still waiting for a noun. I know you’re a redneck, but you do have a vocabulary, if rumor serves.”

Craeg just shook his head. There was no way he was going to disrespect Paradise by laying their private business out—even to a guy like Axe, who seemed, if only because he was, in his own words, a committed narcissist, likely to keep shit tight.

“I don’t know,” Axe said as he stretched his legs out across the seats and leaned against the bus’s darkened windows. “She seems different from her kind. I don’t think you have to worry.”

Yeah, females were totally opposite from males, weren’t they.

And in this case, he was the one being a pussy. She was not. She was ready for their next level—and he suspected he might just be hiding behind her virtue: Once again, he was protecting himself. And when he thought about how she made him feel?

Still seemed like a smart … if perhaps unsustainable … plan.

Christ, they were going to end up alone at some point tonight. It was fucking inevitable. And after two phone sex seshes with her, he was more desperate than ever, a panting, starved, crazy male with an ever-ready cock, and enough orgasms on backup to dehydrate him to the point of needing Gatorade through a vein.

He wanted to believe he could keep to his resolution, he really did.

The trouble was, nothing made him more shortsighted than his name leaving her lips on a gasp.

One syllable and nothing fancy, his was not a regal name. But all she had to do was say it and he was gone, gone, gone. Putty in her hands. Blank of any intention other than getting inside of her and staying there.

Oh, man, he was in such trouble here.

As Paradise entered the human club, shAdoWs, she looked around and thought … yeah, no. Loud music was thumping to the point where she heard it in her skull. Dark purple and red laser beams shot this way and that through air that was thick with human smells. And the overwhelming attention she got was not anything she was interested in.

Having no idea where Craeg, Boone, and Novo were, she walked through the gyrating crowd, and as she went along, human men watched her, assessed her, hoped to catch her eye. She supposed some of them might have been considered attractive, but it was more along the lines of her wandering through someone’s room and noticing a chair with a good slipcover.

The fabric might be nice, but she’d never take it home.

Or in this case, sit on the damn thing.

The building that housed the club had been a warehouse, it looked like, and there was something incongruous about its three-story-high open space nonetheless feeling claustrophobic. Then again, there were just too many people crammed into the center. Where did you just hang out, she wondered. And how did all of them know each other? Everybody seemed to be touching … everybody that was around them.

Working her way across the floor space, she discovered there were booths along the perimeter of all that writhing. Maybe her people were there? Jeez, did she even have the right club—

“Hey, baby, come with me.”

A rough hand grabbed her waist and hauled her up against a sweaty body. Glaring at the human man, she tried to push him away, but he latched hold on her wrists, yanking her in close.

“I know you want this,” he slurred, rubbing his hips against her. He smelled like old cologne, older cigarette smoke—or maybe that was weed?—and a very-not-hot kind of desperation. “Kiss me.”

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Come on, you want it. I know you want it.”

Fuck this, she thought.

With a quick jerk, she freed her right arm and punched him in the throat with her knuckles—and as he bent over and grabbed at his neck, she had to stop herself from breaking his nose with her knee.

Leaving him to gag, she turned and—

Ran smack into Craeg’s enormous chest.

“I was coming to save you,” he said dryly. “But I already learned firsthand you can hold your own—so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that you don’t need me.”

Instantly, everything about the club changed. The air was no longer stuffy; it was filled with sexual heat. The lasers weren’t blinding; they were scintillating. The music wasn’t loud; it was erotic.

The humans were still annoying, but come on, even true love could only do so much.

God, he looked amazing. Tall and broad, big and strong, that Orange cap on his head just like the night they’d first met. That simple white T-shirt showing off his muscles. Those jeans … Jesus, those worn, soft-as-skin jeans that gave her peeks of his thighs in the places that were torn.

“Dance with me,” she said as she leaned into him so he could hear her over the din.

The bill of the baseball hat kept her from seeing his eyes, but she felt them running over what she had changed into before leaving the house: her low-cut blouse and her short little skirt and her tight little jacket were all for him, and they had obviously captivated the guy. He also seemed to like her hair, that she’d left loose, and what she’d done with her makeup.

“Craeg,” she repeated. “Dance with me.”

“I can’t,” he muttered.

“Why?”

“I don’t, like … you know, move that way.”

Such a lie, she thought as she remembered the feel of him on top of her. He moved just frickin’ fine.

“Do it anyway.” She grabbed his hips and pulled them in close. “Dance with me.”

Moving against him to the beat of the music, she felt his immediate response, his arousal popping up, rubbing against her belly because he was so much taller than her.

“People are going to know,” he ground out—but his hands were already on her waist, squeezing, holding their lower bodies together. “From class.”

“Who cares. Like they don’t already.”

Novo knew. Hell, the female was part of the reason they’d kissed for the first time. Peyton? As she’d decided before, she could deal with him. Boone? He cared only about the training; she wasn’t even sure the male knew anyone’s name. And Axe wasn’t even coming tonight. Nor Anslam. And no member of the glymera would ever show up in a place like this.

Live now, she thought, losing herself in being with him, close to him, held by him.

Pulling his head down to her, she whispered in his ear, “I’m not wearing any panties.”

The groan that ripped out of him was louder than even the music.

“Pardon me,” he said, straightening. “I gotta go do something.”

“Mmmm,” she purred, imagining him in the bathroom, taking care of that arousal. “And what might that be?”

“I have to go kill all the human men in this club who are looking at you. Won’t take long, they’re weak and can’t run fast.”

Throwing her head back and laughing, she felt her heart soar, especially as those strong arms wrapped around her even more tightly.

This was going to be the best night of her life. She could feel it.

Chapter Thirty-nine

The 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.”

Chapter Forty

“They 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.