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The Hunters: Declan and Tori, 2003

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The Hunters: Declan and Tori © Copyright Shiloh Walker, 2003.

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Edited by Pamela Campbell

Cover Art by Scott L. Carpenter

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CHAPTER ONE

Tori McAdams was a sensible woman. She didn’t believe in hocus-pocus, she didn’t believe that crossing a black cat’s path was bad luck. She had broken more mirrors than she cared to count and couldn’t remember ever wishing on a star.

And she didn’t believe in vampires.

But the petite little blonde in front of her obviously did. Her eyes were wide and frightened, and from time to time, got that oddly unfocused look of true fear. As a private investigator, Tori had learned to smell bullshit a mile away. And this girl truly believed somebody was stalking her, trying to turn her into a vampire.

Some sick fuck had done a real number on her. No telling what the back-story was, because the girl was getting more incoherent by the second. Jeez, what was she—all of nineteen?

Twenty-eight-year-old Tori suddenly felt very old.

And it wasn’t getting any better as she sat up and took a closer look at the mark on the girl’s neck—revealed as her head fell forward—her pixie-like hair falling away from the ragged gash.

Gash? Or teeth marks? Shit, now she was losing her mind.

But they really did look like teeth marks.

Tori knew she couldn’t turn this poor kid out onto the streets—and young Dani Mitchell was too scared to go home. “He can get me there,” she whispered, over and over again, when Tori had offered to take her.

So, reluctantly, knowing she had no other choice, she made up the little sofa bed in the small room beyond her office. God knew she had spent enough nights here after a late night stake out.

And she doubted the little thing in front of her was a danger. Dani looked about as dangerous as a wet kitten. It took a lot of soothing and hand holding before the girl would stretch out on the bed, but finally she fell asleep.

Tori collapsed into her chair with a sigh and rubbed her eyes with her fingertips. She yearned for a tall, cold margarita, her bed, and some aspirin.

Instead she sat up, reached for the phone, and started making calls.

The last one on her list should have been her first.

But Declan Reilly was somebody she tried to avoid whenever possible.

He made her itchy.

In the worst possible way. Hearing his voice was enough to harden her nipples, dampen her panties and have her verging on the edge of orgasm. He was sex incarnate—sexy as a god, smart as a whip, and just the tiniest bit arrogant. He had wide shoulders, rounded with muscle, a powerful chest that tapered down to a flat, carved belly and narrow hips, strong legs that he covered with denim which encased them so well, showing him to perfection—especially that ass…Tori shook her head, forcing herself to concentrate.

But when Declan was in her thoughts, it was difficult.

A sexy Irish accent remained from the years he had spent growing up in Dublin, and looking into his misty green eyes was almost enough to make Tori believe in leprechauns and faeries.

Almost, but not quite.

He had gone out of his way to make it clear that he found her very appealing. He flirted, he teased, he asked, he seduced. It didn’t take much though; Declan was a seduction—with thick, wavy, blond hair that grew a little too long over his collar, seductive green eyes, a clever mouth, hands with wide palms, and long narrow fingers.

But Tori refused to give in.

She was tempted. Thinking of his hands, his mouth, the way he smelled, damnation, was she tempted.

But there was a flaw.

Only one that she could think of, but it was a doozy.

He was a cop.

No way, no how was she getting involved with a cop. No matter how mouth watering he was.

He wasn’t home. Tori blew out a breath as his lyrical voice floated over the line from his answering machine. She left a simple message, “Call me.”

He was one of the few cops she could count on to get a fair shake. If her man had any similar crimes out there, she would know. She’d also find out if Miss Dani Mitchell was a fake.

And she’d get teased and tormented until she had to relieve her frustrations with her showerhead before she went to bed.

A girl had to do what a girl had to do.

She called the office, hoping maybe he had been called in or delayed. But his cheerful partner, Cy Grady, informed her that Declan was out of town for a few days. She politely refused his offer of help and whirled in her chair to study the sleeping girl lying just beyond the doorway.

With a sigh, she rose and slid her holster back on.

Might as well see if he was haunting the strip joint where Dani worked.

* * * * *

Agreeing to help Dani Mitchell was a choice that Tori was certain she’d live to regret. Oh, the girl was the real deal. Her manager, well, ex-manager, had fired her a few nights earlier when she wigged out in the middle of a lap dance, screaming that the patron had bitten her, his eyes glowed, and he was a monster.

And since said patron had paid very well for that lap dance, the manager, being the gentlemen he was, had been pissed that Dani had gone stark raving mad in front of other customers.

And now, story confirmed, Tori was cornered in an alley by a man who moved faster than greased lightning.

“Where is my little dancer, won’t you tell me?” he purred, crossing the alley like some giant slinking cat, his pale blue eyes seeming to pin her in place.

A cat?she wondered fuzzily.

Not a cat. A snake, a cobra—the kind that could freeze their prey with dread and devour them on the spot, fear holding them prisoner.

And Tori was afraid.

Deeply, mortally afraid. Some thick fog seemed to cloud her brain, the way it did when you were put under at the dentist’s office. But laughing gas never made you feel so frightened or so scared.

Tori didn’t get scared easily, but she was now—for no obvious reason.

She reached up, pressed her fingers to her temples, shaking her head. The slight fog faded, and with it, the fear. All that remained was the slightly edgy feeling caused by nerves.

“I’m not sure what you mean,” she lied easily, shifting her body so that she could draw her gun without it being quite so obvious.

“My little dancer,” he repeated. “I know you’ve seen her. I can smell her on you. I want her back.” He spoke slowly, politely, with just the wisp of an accent in his voice…Spanish?

Smell her? “Can’t help you,” she said flatly. And even though the description she had gotten out of Dani had been basically worthless, she knew she was talking to the man who had been scaring her. “I really don’t know any dancers.”

“Do not lie to me,” he whispered. It sounded like snakes. Like a snake hissing, like snakes slithering against other snakes.

“Not lying.” She didn’t really know Dani. Just because she was trying to help her out didn’t mean she knew her.

He moved—from fifteen feet away to less than five—so quickly, in a blink. Her head was going foggy again. Fortunately, her reflexes weren’t. She stepped back—one step, two—while lifting her gun and pointing it straight at the man’s nose.

“Don’t come any closer,” she warned.

“Do you really think that silly gun can hurt me? Didn’t she warn you? Tell you what I am?”

“A bullet that will rip your head from your shoulders will hurt you, I promise.”

“Rip my head from my shoulders?” he repeated, sounding amused.

His voice sounded like honey now, sweet, addictive. He moved another gliding step closer, and she wanted it. Wanted him to touch her, to taste her. Wanted to hear his voice.

“Yes,” he purred.

The honey was poisoned. She heard it and she narrowed her eyes. Concentrated. Focused.

The man’s eyes narrowed and he cocked his head, studying her—puzzled.

“Get away from me,” she said softly. “Now.”

“No.” He said it just as softly, an evil smile curling his mouth. “I think I’ve changed my mind. I don’t want that silly little dancer now. I want you.”

A sick ball of fear curled in her belly but she only arched an eyebrow. “Sorry. Charming as the offer is, I’ll have to pass.” Her arm was starting to shake. She couldn’t keep that gun aimed at his angelic looking face much longer.

“It’ll be fun,” he promised, as if she hadn’t spoken. “You will be a fun toy, not just an appetizing snack. I bet you’re a good fuck, as well. I bet you’ve got a tight, wet little pussy. I’m going to enjoy finding out.”

Color heated her cheeks and she fell back another step.

He laughed and lunged.

The bullet tore through his nasal bones, through his brain and out the back of his skull. He fell backward.

And lay on the ground, still breathing, still bleeding. Still living—and cursing her.

Tori ran.

She holed up in her office.

She had food, bullets, a shower in the back and spare clothes. She had a crazy dancer in her bed.

She could handle this.

He hadn’t actually started trying to come after her. He hadn’t really been rolling to his knees, his ruined voice swearing, damning and cursing her.

He had been dead. It was just her imagination going into overtime. He had just been so eerie.

So strange.

So scary.

He had scared her. Deep, gut wrenching, pee-in-your-pants scared her. Tori paced the small confines of her office, trying to figure out what she was going to do.

Either he was what Dani had said or Tori had killed a man.

She whirled and grabbed the phone.

Declan.

She needed to call Declan.

He could help.

Of course, why she was so certain, she didn’t know. But he could help. He would help.

She had his pager number, and she was almost positive he always kept it with him, even while on personal time. Dialing the number, she listened to the soothing melody of his voice, and left a message of her own.

“This is Tori. As soon as you get this, call me. Declan, I need you.” She marked it urgent, sent it, and slammed down the phone.

Curling in her chair, she settled down to wait, her eyes on the door.

* * * * *

Stupid, fucking bitch.

The damned bullet had almost taken his head off, and that would have killed him.

Manuel prowled the confines of his rooms, cursing the blue-eyed bitch and the pain in his head while he healed.

It was a good thing he had his rooms close. His human had been with him, watching with veiled jealousy while he searched for his little dancer. The tall, slim man had gotten him back to his rooms before sunrise, and eagerly ripped open yet another vein for him. Manuel had been tempted to drain him. He needed the blood, needed the energy to speed his healing. But the human may yet prove useful. After all, he had gotten him back here, fed him and protected him.

Which meant Manuel would live to find her.

His human watched warily from the corner. He’d forgotten this one’s name already. Not that it really mattered. He changed humans almost as often as he changed his mind.

He’d tire of this one soon. And either kill him or let him go quietly mad when Manuel left him to fend for himself. He could always feed without forcing the dependence on his humans, but it was such fun to watch the slavish devotion on their faces as he fed—as he brutalized, or loved tenderly—just depending on his moods.

Of course, when he left, the devotion stayed. And the human always went crazy without him there.

The woman—she’d been different. He didn’t know how, or why, but she had been different. Each time he had tried to beguile her with his voice—first with fear and then with seduction—she had shaken it off, shaken him off. Yes, she was different.

Manuel had been looking forward to figuring out why. Stupid bitch. He would have used a different method with her—his normal methods tended to destroy a human’s paltry mind—and he hadn’t wanted hers destroyed.

But now…now, her blood was going to flow in a red river when he was finished.

He turned and pierced his human with a fiery blue gaze. His face was disfigured for now, disgustingly so. But when he whispered, “Come,” the man rushed to him, falling to his knees to take Manuel’s now exposed cock in his mouth.

While the once heterosexual man suckled and ate at his Master’s cock, Manuel imagined it was her—that damnable woman, on her knees in front of him, her back bleeding from a dozen different stripes.

* * * * *

Her new roommate up and left her, after she had heard what Tori had to say. “He’ll find you,” she whispered. “I’m sorry. This is my fault.”

Then Dani was gone, like she had never been there.

Tori dozed lightly throughout the day. Her phone rang half a dozen times but she never answered it. None of the numbers on the caller ID were Declan and he was the only one she would trust right now.

She ate sparingly, drank like a fish, orange juice, tomato juice, anything in the place that was highly acidic. She wasn’t even aware she was eating a clove of garlic until it was nearly gone.

“Oh, God. I’m as crazy as she is,” she whispered—scrubbing her hands, her teeth, gargling—trying to wash the strong garlic taste from her mouth and get rid of the smell. Then she reached for more orange juice.

The gallon that had been full that morning was now in the trash.

And she was guzzling down tomato juice which for some odd reason, she had liberally laced with garlic salt.

“Next thing you know I’ll be hanging garlic from the eaves and windows.”

“Wouldn’t work. It has to be in your blood. It could touch him and never faze him. But if he ingests it, it will hurt him.”

Tori jumped, almost certain she had heard a voice.

“He’s coming.”

The shadows in the room were thickening as the sun set. She refused to turn the lights on. Almost as if she were afraid it would make her easier to find.

But how could he find her?

“He will.”

“SHUT UP!” she bellowed, pressing her hands to her temples.

“Fight. If he bleeds enough, it will weaken him and take him long to recover.”

She really was hearing that voice.

“The garlic will weaken him—can poison some weaker vamps. The acid will hurt him and he won’t want any more blood from you. Between the garlic and the acid, you’re poisoning your blood. It will keep him from draining you. You want him to take as little of your blood inside as possible. It will make his hold on you weaker.”

It felt like an old woman’s voice—like her grandmother—a very wise Kiowa woman whose father had been a shaman. She didn’t really sound old. It was more a feeling, like one of wisdom.

Alice Whitewolf had been the closest thing to magic Tori had ever known.

Of course, Alice had been dead for nearly fifteen years. It wasn’t her voice. But it sounded and felt like her.

Somebody wise.Somebody ancient in more than years.

The sun had set.

Minutes crawled by while more advice was whispered into her head.

Sunlight weakens them. If they are ill or starving or newly changed, it can kill them. It takes time for the body to adjust to tolerate even the smallest bit of sunlight in the dusk. The early morning sun and the midday sun are the most deadly, even to the full Master vamps. And it will kill the lesser vamps. There was more…

“When you wake up, eat.”

“You won’t want to, but eat. Anything. Everything. It will keep the change from completing.”

“You will have to hide for a while.”

“Silver can hurt them. Wood cannot, unless it totally destroys the heart, not just pierces it. Destroying the heart will kill. Taking their heads will kill them. Fire will kill.”

“You may not be able to kill him now. You may want to die later. But you will live. And then you can become strong enough.”

“I’ve lost it,” she whispered, settling into the chair, gun in hand, making herself as small as possible while trying to block the voice in her mind.

“Use the gun. It hurt him before. Shoot his head, his heart, his throat, where the big arteries are. Bleed him. Fight him.”

“Damn right I’ll fight,” she hissed, unaware she had started to rock. “I’m not ready to die.”

A soft, sad sigh seemed to shimmer in the air. “You’re going to.”

And then the door flew open.

Tori started firing the second she saw those eerie blue eyes. Even when he took her body down, she continued to fire. Shooting with one hand until the gun was empty, while she clawed and struggled and kicked.

She hadn’t tried to run. She needed to be here.

Here.

Here.

He tore into her throat and it hurt. Agony tore through her as he started to feast.

He tore away from her almost the second he swallowed, bellowing.

He shot to his feet and kicked her in the side.

“What did you do?” he shrieked, his voice gone hoarse.

She lay there, bleeding from the wound in her throat, her blood seeping out on the floor. Picking her up, he hurled her across the room. Already near death, it didn’t even hurt, though her blood sprayed everywhere.

All around, furniture flew and crashed, while the man, no, while the vampire bled slowly from half a dozen different wounds. Dark fog started to cloud her mind but she dragged her eyes open, unable to stop watching him.

And eventually, he stopped. Came to kneel beside her. “I cannot have you die too quickly, stupid bitch,” he whispered, stroking her hair almost tenderly. “You hurt me, eating all the garlic, turning your blood into near poison. All the acid in it burned my throat. You need to suffer more than just a quick bloody death.” He mewled softly. “All that lovely blood wasted.”

He used his teeth to open a vein in his wrist, held it to her mouth with an iron grasp when she tried to turn her head. “You’ll suffer now. A newly turned vamp doesn’t do too well alone. Some die even with a Master to guide and protect them. You will be alone. You’ll suffer, and starve, and thirst, and die painfully,” he crooned after she had swallowed the thick, bitter tasting blood.

Tori remembered nothing beyond that—nothing beyond trying to make herself vomit it back up.

She came to and stared around her. Lying on the floor in the middle of her destroyed office, she tried to remember what had happened. Why she lay in a pool of dried blood, why she was holding her gun. Why she hurt, oh, she hurt.

There was a deep, throbbing, burning pain low in her belly. With every slow beat of her heart, the pain worked its way up until it was in her head as well. By the time she was able to force herself onto her hands and knees the burning, tearing agony was eating into her brain, trying to force its way outside through her skull.

Pain stiffened her neck, making it difficult to move it, and inside her body hurt. It seemed as though her very veins and arteries burned.

She couldn’t think clearly. Couldn’t remember.

But that voice. She remembered it.

Eat.

Hide.

Eat.

Hide.

Eat.

Hide.

She ate a steak. Raw. She ate half a bag of potatoes. Chocolate cake. A bag of stale Cheetos. Anything she could get her hands on, she ate, even though every bite made her want to vomit. Even though she had to force herself to swallow instead of gag.

The food rebelled in her belly.

Her blood seemed to boil and burn in her veins as she crept away from the office late that night, slinking in the shadows, keeping away from the roads. She walked and walked and walked until she came to a tiny little shack nearly fifteen miles from her office.

Her father’s little fishing shack, perched on the banks of the Ohio. She hid there, in the tiny little cellar underneath the house. She hid there and cried and ached and burned.

CHAPTER TWO

Declan Reilly was trying desperately to get drunk.

He’d been brooding in front of the fire, drinking slowly and steadily from the bottle of good Irish whiskey, while he stared into the dancing flames. He wasn’t getting drunk quickly enough.

Tori was gone.

Dead.

Tori McAdams, the sexy P.I. he had been trying to get close to for months. Everything about her drove him insane, from her tightly curled, long chestnut- brown hair to her big blue eyes. From her high rounded breasts and slim waist to her full hips and curvy ass, to the way she smelled like peaches and sex. But most of all, that stubborn, feisty spirit, and that soft heart she tried so hard to hide.

She was gone.

His eyes seemed to burn as his head fell back and he tried to block the images from his mind. Her neat, spartan little office had been destroyed, splattered with blood, human and not. He knew the scent. It had been faint and decaying, but he knew the scent. The blood of a vampire was hard to mistake, once you knew it.

There had been a good deal of it.

But even more of Tori’s. Oh, God. Tori.

His hands clenched and the glass tumbler in his hand shattered. He closed his fist over the shards of glass buried in his hand, welcoming the pain.

He had failed her.

She had called, finally. She had called him, had needed him.

And he hadn’t been here.

A weak, scrambling sound tickled his ears.

He almost ignored it, too caught up in his own grief.

But he got up, blood trickling down his fingers to fall on the floor as he walked to the front door and opened it.

She almost fell at his feet.

Declan stumbled and caught the lean brunette who tumbled into his arms, out of the pouring rain, dead white and half unconscious.

It was Tori, who had been missing for a good week, and presumed dead after police discovered her office in a bloody mess, literally, blood and gore staining the walls, furniture smashed, filing cabinets overturned.

He hadn’t been in town last weekend. And he had cursed himself. If he had been around, he would have found her, maybe before it was too late. He would have been with her when it happened, and he could have stopped it. And he had suffered through night after sleepless night, suffered through a rage more terrible than any he had ever known.

Tori, who had a left a terse, “Call me,” on his machine the night she was last seen by anybody. Followed by another, more urgent message. This is Tori. As soon as you get this, call me. Declan, I need you.

He had started lusting for flesh and blood, to find that bastard who had done this, and rip his guts out.

But by the time he had gotten back to town and been informed of what had happened, it was too late. The trail nearly cold, and all the clues he could have used were demolished under the heels of his fellow officers.

But she was here now.

It was Tori, who had rebuffed him in every way imaginable. And now she was on his doorstep, lying listless in his arms. Listless, pale and still. Humans had more movement than that, made more sounds.

Sharp hearing detected something.

Or rather, a lack of something.

Declan hissed, his eyes narrowing as he carried her to the couch and jerked her shirt open. Laying his head on her chest between her breasts, he listened.

Lub-dub.

Thirty seconds passed before he heard it again.

Lub-dub.

He leaned over, pushed her wet ringlets away from her neck.

Lub-dub.

He took a deep breath, forced himself to open his eyes and saw it.

The ragged wound, gaping and huge when fresh, now closing, remnants of bruising. She had fought.

Had she been drained?

Or changed?

Draining was generally slow business. One vamp alone wasn’t likely to have drained her to the point of killing her in one feeding. A new vamp could drain a person, fairly easily, because they were so starved, so hungry when the change first came. So a newly turned vamp? That would make finding him a little easier.

Or maybe two or three different vamps, or one, feeding two or three different times, yeah, that would do it. The messy bite at her neck could have very well been made at separate times, separate feedings. Maybe two bites, not one.

But if she had been bled so much as to put her in this condition, she wouldn’t have been able to stumble to his door.

Changing usually took place over a period of time as well, the blood exchange taking place when the victim was near death, running so low on blood it gave a whole new twist on the term anemia.

His nostrils flared and he scented it along her skin now. The subtle musk of vampire. Nausea and rage roiled in his gut. Throwing his head back, he drew air into his lungs and forced it out through his nose until the blinding rage cleared a bit.

Then he lowered his head, and crouched back over her.

The clothes she wore were filthy. They were covered in blood and dirt and grime, but, with the exception of missing buttons on her shirt, relatively intact. Under her nails were tiny bits of flesh and blood—none of it her own. He blew a breath out between his teeth and tentatively reached for the zipper of her jeans. The heavy black cloth parted, revealing her ivory smooth skin, and lower, a small thatch of dark curls.

No blood there. No signs of bruising.

Then she probably hadn’t been raped prior to being bitten, which happened, unfortunately, all too often. Most of the feral vamps he had known would have fed during the rape, or before.

Not after. It takes the fun out of it when your food lay there listless and broken. Ferals liked their sex painful and rough and bloody. Of course, he had killed a good many of the ferals he had known, so he had an extensive knowledge of them.

Not that all of the vamps were evil. A good number of them were decent people, like Tori had been. But the changing warped them, all too often, robbing them of what they needed to live happily. Some of them continued to live, unhappily. A few went on to live with some semblance of happiness.

Others ended their lives.

Others, while unhappy, were filled with a sense of purpose.

Suddenly her eyes flew open and her hands latched onto his shirt while she stared up at him wildly. Her fingers curled, clutched at his shirt for a brief second before she fell limply back on the couch.

She was weak, very weak.

“Declan?” she whispered. “He…bit me. He bit—”

Her eyes rolled back and her head started to jerk, her body convulsing. Blood trickled from the corner of her mouth as her fangs started to emerge. Her heart rate started to kick up, erratic and broken sounding. Her skin seemed to burn.

She was dying, starving to death.

Changed, then.

She had been turned a good week, if Declan had figured right, and her fangs were just now coming? If her fangs were just now emerging, she hadn’t fed. No wonder she was starving.

He wondered if she knew how to feed.

Her eyes closed and her head went limp, rolling toward him. He hissed and fell back. Her fangs had cut through. Pearly sharp canines on top and bottom, canines that she would learn to retract somewhat and hide.

If she lived long enough.

Declan sighed, his head falling forward. Long, shaggy, blond hair fell into his eyes as he tried to convince himself he was debating what the proper course of action was to be. But he was just trying to delay the inevitable.

He had been dying for a taste of her for months.

And now she was going to get a taste of him.

He grimaced wryly as he realized he was about to become a vamp’s first meal. Lifting his wrist to his mouth, he used his own fairly sharp canines to rip his flesh before he held the bleeding wound to her mouth.

She gagged and swallowed. Gagged, swallowed. Long seconds passed when she did little else than gag and sputter and then Declan felt the sharp pain of her incisors cutting into his skin, felt her hands come up to hold his wrist greedily against her mouth. Her tongue lashed out, caressing his flesh. Her mouth felt like silk, hot wet silk, as she fed.

He knew the minute the monster inside her started to emerge. It called to the one inside of him, the animal that was part of him. His skin grew tight and itchy, his jaws started to ache. The skin along his spine started to ripple and pulse. If he had bothered to look, he would have seen the hair starting to grow thicker on his hands, his forearms and his face. He lifted his face upward, revealing that it was lengthening and stretching, as his hair started to flow more heavily down his back. Declan forced himself to breathe slowly, steadily, forcing his body and mind into a light state of meditation as the muscles in his shoulders and arms rippled and started to bulge.

His soft green eyes were swirling and shifting—alternating colors of green and gold, glowing with power and a shifter’s magic as they grew larger in his face. Breathing slowly and evenly, he focused on Tori’s pale, still face.

Couldn’t change.

You have the control.

Wouldn’t change.

You have the power.

And he did. Declan was power, a primal, powerfully primitive force that walked around in human skin.

Well, human skin most of the time.

Slowly, the urge and the animal inside him faded and he opened eyes that gleamed only slightly in the dim room, to stare into Tori’s lovely alabaster face, once more alive and mobile.

Well, maybe alive wasn’t such a good word. And her lovely, sapphire blue eyes were empty still, full of nothing but monster and hunger and greed.

“Let go now, Tori,” he said softly, tapping her cheek with his free hand.

A low, sexy growl emerged from her throat. And her fangs slid a little deeper into his flesh. He blinked once, slowly, at that tiny, exquisite little pain.

“Let. Go.” She’d drain him dry, if he let her. The bastard who did this had known damn good and well what he had done. Either let her die, or the innocent she would finally feed on.

Of course, a shifter had a better chance than the average human. With a wrench, he tore his wrist from her and got to his feet quickly, moving a pace or two away, out of reach of her seeking hands, and grabbed a discarded shirt. Tearing a strip of fabric from it, he tied a makeshift bandage around his wrist and watched her. She still reached for him, and started to slither in his direction.

“Tori.”

Her eyes were glowing brightly; swirling pools of lust and hunger and need. He felt his own hunger rising, felt his cock hardening, felt the urge to mate, wildly, mindlessly, with her. Mate while she fed from him, and he fed off of her, until they simply couldn’t do it any more. Kinda made the idea of fucking to death sound rather appealing.

“Tori McAdams.”

Those slumberous, heavy lidded eyes blinked and her head cocked.

“Tori!”

Her lids fluttered shut, then she shot to her feet, pressed her hands to her temples and started to scream.

Oh, God. Baby, what did he do? Declan thought helplessly, his feet moving in her direction, even though he knew it wasn’t really safe. Not yet. Then the screaming stopped.

“What did he do to me?” she rasped out, touching her fingers to her mouth and gathering the drying blood. Staring at the red stain on her fingers, she keened, a low helpless sound.

“I’m sorry, Tori,” Declan whispered.

“Sorry?”

“Sorry?”

“What the hell has happened to me?” she shouted, her long, graceful hands clenched into tight fists.

“You’ve been bitten,” he said softly.

Did she remember?

By the growing horror and disbelief in her eyes, most likely yes, she did remember.

“That man…” her voice trailed off and she swallowed, a loud audible sound in the silence of the room. “He was strong. Too strong. And his…he had…his eyes—” Her voice trailed off and she fell silent for long seconds. “His eyes glowed. Almost red. He was going to hurt me. And, at first, I wanted it. I wanted it.” Her voice fell to a low, awful rasp as she repeated, “I wanted it.”

So he had lulled her. A true, full vamp then. Not one of the lesser vampires, the kind that was barely a step above an animal, one with only the instincts to hunt, to kill, to obey his Master.

This one had beguiled her.

“Tori, you did nothing wrong. He made you want it, hypnotism, if you will.”

“He did something to my mind,” she whispered, in a soft, almost singsong voice. “Made me afraid. Then he made me want it. Want whatever he wanted to do. And then I shot him.”

“Shot him?” This wasn’t something he had expected to hear.

“I shot him and I ran and he found me. He found me and bit me and beat me and made me drink his blood.” She said each word slowly, as if it hurt, as if the words were pulled from her throat like glass.

“I am sorry, Tori. So very sorry,” he whispered. She had shot a vamp? One who had beguiled her? Ran away and hid?

She whirled on him and shouted, “You just fed me your blood and you’re sorry?”

“Sorry this happened. Sorry it happened to you,” he said quietly, deciding she was herself. Or as close to herself as she was likely to get for quite some time. So he moved a little closer. “Do you know what has happened?” It was no surprise, of course, that the vamp had found her after she ran. Vamps could track by scent almost as well as a wolf could.

But it was surprising that she had shot it. After it had beguiled her. Or tried to.

She hugged her arms tightly around her body, staring into the distance with blind eyes. “This isn’t possible,” she whispered. “Not possible. I’m going crazy.”

“No.” Declan started to reach for her and then he let his hand fall. “You aren’t going crazy.”

“What are you? Are you…like me?”

“I’m a wolf,” he said quietly.

She laughed, a shrill painful laugh. “A wolf? The cop I’ve been lusting after for months is a wolf? Talk about a wolf in sheep’s clothing.” She whirled away and started pacing the room.

“A wolf,” she continued to mutter under her breath. “Drinking blood. I’m out of my fucking mind.”

Declan sighed. With quick, economical motions, he shed his clothes and waited until she caught a glimpse. And then a longer look, until finally she turned and stared at him, her eyes wide, shocked, and heated. Her pink tongue darted out to lick her lips before she asked roughly, “What are you doing?”

He didn’t answer as he fell to his knees and cried out as the heat raced along his skin, followed by a flow of fur. It hurt. It always hurt at first. But it was a delicious pain, much like her fangs sinking into his flesh. First, his face lengthened, a muzzle grew and his longish blond hair thickened and became denser. The flow of fur raced down over his body like a waterfall as his muscles enlarged and his body changed and shifted. The rippling fur obscured much of the change from sight as his arms stretched and lengthened. His chest widened and deepened as a fine pelt of fur covered it, thinning down to a silky pelt over his belly and groin where his cock thrust out—hard and thick and full—perfectly formed.

His hips were still lean and muscled, covered with that same silky fur that started to thicken as it flowed down his thighs, thighs that were heavy with muscle. Two sickening thuds filled the room as the bones in his legs reformed beneath the fur as it raced on down to his feet, covering them—larger, longer and broader, made better to run and jump and lunge.

It only took seconds, under a minute, and he was free. The animal inside him rejoiced while the human continued to watch his companion warily. If it had been another vamp, even one of the few he called friends, he never would have shifted in front of them. It left him helpless for a few brief seconds, and he couldn’t ever let down his guard.

But this was Tori.

Well, there was one other…

When he finally rose, his bulky body was just a few inches taller than it had been, but larger, more powerful, more muscled. His gait was slightly awkward. Standing on his hind legs in this form tested his balance a bit. But he could walk upright.

Or drop to all fours and run faster than any timber wolf could hope to. He cocked his head, staring at Tori. “Holy shit. You meant a fucking werewolf.”

“Not were,” he growled, forcing the words over his tongue. It felt so fucking awkward to talk in this form. “Wolf. Moon means nothing.”

Her eyes trailed lower and lower, pausing on his hard cock. Declan growled deep in his chest. He couldn’t help it. Just her scent made him hard, and the change always had a vaguely sexual feel to it.

But when she took a step in his direction, her pink tongue darting out to wet her lips again, he moved back. “Don’t,” he grunted, shaking his maned head.

“Why not?”

He closed his eyes, banished the creeping power. Changing back could be exhausting, but it was painless. Within a few heartbeats of time, he was sitting crossed legged on the floor, naked. And when he looked back at her, it was from human eyes. From human flesh. “It’s not you who wants this,” he said, staring at her while she stared at his straining penis. He closed one fist over his cock, dragging it up the thick, ruddy length slowly, his lids drooping as the rounded head was swallowed by the grip of his hand. A long, raspy sigh escaped him as he pumped his cock, staring at her for a long moment before his hand fell away. Declan rose slowly, shaking his head. “It’s what the vampirism has put inside you that wants this.”

Dragging her eyes from his erection, she stared at him, her own eyes glowing softly, renewed vitality and life and health glowing in her face. And lust.

“You are wrong,” she said softly.

“No. You don’t want this, not with me.”

Reaching out, she closed one slim, cool hand over his cock and squeezed. He hissed, his head falling back. He was trying to be a gentleman here. She was confused, had been hurt and had had her life ripped away from her. He was too decent a guy to take advantage of her, even if he fantasized about it for a few brief seconds.

But she was making it hard.

In several ways.

“You’re wrong. I’ve always wanted you,” she whispered heatedly, dropping to her knees in front of him. Her tongue darted out and she licked him daintily before lifting her shadowed eyes to stare at him. “I always wanted you. And I wanted to live a long, healthy normal life, with a family, and a man to love me.”

“That was taken away, it seems. But I can have you. Can’t I?”

A rumbling growl erupted from his throat when her wet, pink lips closed over his cock, and took his length down her throat. One hand came up and fisted in her damp curls, holding her back when she would have swallowed him down a second time.

He felt her fangs nick him as he pulled away, jerked her to her feet and whirled, pinning her against the wall. He stared at her, gasping for breath while she smiled lazily at him.

“Always?” he repeated. “If you’ve wanted me, then why haven’t you been with me? I’ve made myself clear on the matter, haven’t I? I knew ya were attracted, but ya stayed so damn far away.”

She shrugged lazily. “I had a rule about not getting involved with cops,” she said, the shadows drifting back into her lovely blue eyes while she trailed her hands up and down his side. “I had a lot of rules, and look where they led me.”

“So, what? You want to fuck me because life fucked you over?”

“No. Because life has fucked me over, I think maybe I’ll actually start living the way I’ve always wanted, instead of the way I always thought I should,” she replied. Leaning forward, she nipped at his lower lip before staring up at him. “And I have wanted you since the day we met.”

“Oh, well, then,” Declan said weakly as her hands closed over his ass and pulled him against her pelvis. Son of a bitch, he was no bloody saint.

Declan’s head lowered and he nuzzled at her neck, cuddled her close to him. Bending over, he tossed her weight over his shoulder and carried her upstairs. Depositing her on the toilet, he turned away and set the hot water to running in the shower.

He could feel her eyes on him as he knelt in front of her, stripping her torn, filthy clothes from her body—could hear the slightly elevated heartbeat that lust was causing—could smell the old sweat, the filth and blood on her, and the musk of the vampire that had changed her, the decaying scent of his blood.

And under it all he could smell Tori—the scent of peaches and sex, the scent that had driven him out of his mind for months.

“You have his blood on you,” he said quietly, lifting her in his arms like a child and taking her into the shower. Lowering her to her feet, he reached for shampoo and lathered her hair while the water poured over her body, draining away in a swirl of muddy brown and rust red as the dirt and blood started to slough away. “His smell.”

Her head fell back and she sighed in pleasure as his hands massaged her scalp, her neck, and her back before he rinsed the suds away. Declan smiled slightly when she jumped under his hands as he soaped her up-thrust breasts and gently curved belly.

She gasped and flinched, when he carefully cleaned the wound on her neck. He had saved it for last, soaping and rinsing it carefully before lowering his head to kiss the angry red flesh and fading bruises.

“It still hurts,” she whispered roughly. “But when he did it, I thought the pain alone was going to kill me.”

“He was angry. They usually save the pain for sex, not feeding. Most vamps, even the feral ones, will make the feeding pleasant,” he said flatly, battling the rage down when her voice broke just a little. “You bled him, didn’t you?”

Her lashes lowered and she nodded. “Not that it did me any good.” Reaching up, she touched one sharp, pearly fang. “I couldn’t stop him.”

“Shh,” Declan murmured, lowering his head and kissing her mouth. His tongue slid past her lips and caressed the fangs before going deeper to taste her. As the hot water continued to pulse down around him, he turned and backed her up against the wall, returning to kiss and nuzzle the scarred flesh at her neck before he dropped to his knees in front of her, his mouth seeking out one ruby red nipple and tugging at it with his teeth.

His other hand caressed and stroked her side, her hips and her ass. His palm glided down the length of her thigh, massaging and stroking his way down to her ankle as he started to kiss his way down her torso—to her navel and the tight curls between her thighs. He slid his tongue between her folds, and lapped at her clitoris as he lifted her ankle and draped her leg over his shoulder, opening her.

Above him, he could hear her heavy pants, the steady pace of her heart, smell the heavy scent of peaches that seemed to pour from her aroused body. Her nails dug into his flesh when he entered her vagina with his tongue. She came in a flood the second he stroked his fingers between the cheeks of her ass.

Tori felt the hot, silken stroke of his tongue gliding between her labial lips, felt the caress of his fingers between her buttocks and she whimpered, burying her hands in his hair. The water pounded down on her torso, splattering her face and hair as he started to stroke, in and out, with his tongue. Oh, damn it, could it really reach there?

It did, and she climaxed again with a tiny weak scream, her lungs begging for air, while she gasped and panted. He pulled away slowly, nibbling on her soft, tender flesh and flicking her clit a final time before he withdrew.

When he slid her leg back down, pulling away from her reluctantly, she collapsed onto his lap, his cock pressed into her belly. “You taste even better than you smell,” he whispered, his voice deep, guttural. “God, I could eat you up.”

“You just did.” She lifted her head from his shoulder, her eyes glowing and blue and deep enough to drown in. And full of hunger again. The look in her eyes was growing less rational by the moment and something not quite human was lurking just behind her face.

Declan knew he hadn’t fed her enough blood to satiate the urge inside her. He wasn’t certain her control was good enough; hell, he knew it wasn’t.

When she lowered her open mouth to his throat, he stopped her. “No,” he rasped, catching her face between his hands. “Not yet.” He wasn’t about to let her feast on him while they fucked.

“Yes,” she whispered, as her personality leaked from her eyes, replaced by the monster.

“No,” he whispered, catching her mouth with his. She tried to bite him, but he withdrew before she could, returning a second later with more soft caresses while he pinned her hands behind her. She was still weak enough that it wasn’t even a struggle to hold her still so he used his other hand to fondle her.

And eventually, lust won out over hunger. When he bent to kiss her, Declan shuddered in pleasure as she kissed him in return, her head falling back to allow him better access. When his tongue entered her mouth again she caught it and sucked it delicately, a low hum of pleasure rising from her chest. Carefully, he released her hands, ready to pin her again, but she only planted them on his shoulders and rocked her pelvis against him.

He grasped her ass in his hands and lifted her. “Do it,” he whispered against her throat. “Take me inside. Aw, fuck.” Her tight wet vagina closed over the tip of his shaft, sliding slowly down as she wound her legs around his waist. Bloody hell, she was tight and hot. How could she be that hot? Declan wondered, arching his hips and working his cock deeper inside her. The few female vamps he had been with had seemed cool until they leeched enough of his body heat to warm their blood, their body, their vaginas.

Opening his eyes, he stared into her lovely face, watched as color rushed to her cheeks. He’d wonder about that later, he knew. But for now…shit, this was Tori he was holding—Tori’s firm ass he held in his hands, her breasts pushing against his chest as he slid the rest of the way inside her.

Tori who started to ride him, gripping his cock with the muscles in her pussy and stroking him while she rode him slowly. “So pretty,” he mumbled, reaching up and shoving her wet hair from her face so he could nuzzle at her cheek and jaw, her neck and shoulders.

He stiffened when her lips brushed his throat, but she didn’t try to bite. Instead, she kissed him softly, then her head fell back and she leaned back, bracing her shoulders against the wall, her pretty round tits lifting up. He leaned forward, pinning her against the wall and taking one nipple in his mouth as he dug his cock inside her.

“Declan…oh, hell. Declan, please, please, please.” He bit down on her nipple as he drove inside her harder, riding her, listening to her moan and loving it. At the touch of his teeth closing on her flesh, she started to shudder and clamp down around his cock, her hot, wet tissues gripping him in a silken, steel caress that sent him tumbling over the edge. Her climax gushed from her in flowing waves, driving Declan just a little more insane as her cream coated him and her scent permeated the whole room.

Moments later, she started to laugh.

A little hysterically.

“Son of a bitch,” she said on a giggle. “What an unbelievable week. I get bitten by a vampire, which logically cannot have happened. Since logically vampires can’t possibly exist. I start hearing voices in my head. And I’m having my fantasy fuck with you, who just happens to turn into a wolf on occasion.”

Declan smiled, a little sadly. Yeah, a bad week, he was figuring. He shifted, reached and turned off the shower, turning to lift her into his lap. The water drying on his flesh didn’t bother him. He figured it shouldn’t have bothered her either. Being a vamp, she wasn’t likely to notice heat or cold any more.

So when she started to shiver, Declan’s eyes narrowed. Conversationally, he said, “Your fantasy fuck, hmm? Aye, I like that, seeing as how you’re mine as well.” All the while he was trailing his fingers up and down her arm, before coming to rest on her brachial pulse.

Oh, he could hear her heart beating, well enough, aye. But he didn’t quite trust his ears right now. How could he? When they were telling him that her heart was easily beating a good forty times a minute? It shouldn’t be beating more than twenty or thirty, or even less, considering they had just fucked themselves into a stupor.

A vamp’s heart tended to beat no more than ten to twenty times a minute—even when excited. And after expending energy, it tended to slow down to even less. Hell, he knew vamps that could go nearly an hour between heartbeats. Older vamps had hearts that would slow and stop completely, until feeding again.

So why was hers beating at a steady forty-six beats a minute? And she was actually breathing. He could hear the air moving in and out of her lungs, little things he had missed earlier, in his shock.

“What voices?” he asked, wanting a little more time to try puzzling this out.

But since she was cold—and shaking with it now—he rose, holding her in his arms like he’d hold a child.

While he was drying her body off, she said, “A woman. She reminded me of my grandmother. Grandma Alice was Native American, the granddaughter of an old medicine man. She was…wise, spiritual. Special. And the voice I heard reminded me of her.”

“When did you hear this?”

“After I called you the last time.While I was waiting for him to find me.”

His head flew up and he stopped drying her long, lovely legs—stopped imagining them around his waist while he took her against the wall again. His bottle green eyes narrowed and he repeated softly, “Waiting for him to find you? Ya knew he was comin’, you idiot girl, and ya didna go hide?”

One black brow lifted and she said, “Your Irish really comes out when you’re angry, you know, Declan?” And then she shrugged. “He would have found me. I wouldn’t have been safe, so why bother?”

He bit down a dozen nasty curses and asked tersely, “What exactly was this voice telling you while you were waitin’ for death to come aknockin?”

“Garlic.Orange juice. Bleed.” Her eyes had darkened and become haunted. Then she shook her head and looked back at him, shaking off the memories he knew were returning. “The voice was whispering all sorts of things. Whispering them inside my head. Eat garlic. It told me it would change my blood and the vampire wouldn’t be able to ingest it. Drink acidic juices. The acid upsets their metabolism somehow. That the sun will hurt or kill weaker vamps and lesser vamps. Lesser vamps? To make him bleed, even if it wouldn’t kill him. To hide.”

Then her eyes narrowed. “And eat. She kept telling me when it was over, I had to eat. Had to. And when I—” Her voice faltered and she stopped, closing her eyes and forcing herself to breathe steadily. “And when I woke up, she said it again. Loudly, until I finally did it. I ate, and ate, and ate, and ate. And then I hid.”

She lifted confused looking eyes to Declan and asked, “Why would she tell me to eat?”

Declan worried his lip with his teeth while listening to her speak. Eat, eh? Why the bloody hell is that so important?

While he was pondering this, she absently rubbed her belly and said, “Speaking of food, can I get hungry? I am hungry. I want food. Can I want food?”

Declan had heard bits and pieces of such things, but he had always attributed them to legend. Stories of vampires who were aided by forces not of this world, vampires immune to the dangers of the sun, who could walk among humans and convince all that they were human—eating, drinking, taking the sun.

Vampires didn’t eat. A very few older ones could drink liquids—wine and such—in small amounts.

But a vampire simply couldn’t walk in daylight. It was one of the few things that helped control them, natural selection to keep the stronger, more vicious species under control.

Of course, sometime nature needed extra help. And that would explain Tori.

The pieces of the puzzle were falling into place. He roughly guessed it was nearing sunrise. And figured this was the only way to know for certain. “D’ya trust me, Tori McAdams?” he asked, taking a shirt from the back of the door and buttoning her into it.

“Trust you?”

“Aye. Do you trust me?”

A tiny smile curved her mouth, sad and bittersweet, as she lifted her hands, palms up, asking, “If I didn’t trust you, why would I have come here? I knew that if I could get to you, you could help me. Would protect me.”

“I will. Come with me now. We’ve something we need to be doing,” he said, guiding her down the stairs and to the large eastern window.

She sensed what he was doing and she hesitated. “I’m newly changed, Declan. She said the sun could kill the newly changed. And even if I’m not happy with my new diet, I’m not ready to die yet.”

Stroking a reassuring hand down her back, he held her in place. “It takes more than a few seconds, darlin’ girl. It takes being thrown out into the sunlight and chained in place while the sun chars the flesh from your bones over a period of time. If this hurts even a bit, I’ll get you away.”

“Declan, what…”

He shushed her, pressing his lips to her mouth, and cuddling her against him. “You’re going to be fine.”

“You mean, you don’t think the sun is going to hurt me?” she asked, fear in her voice. Her neat nails bit into his arm while she stared out the window into the lightening horizon.

“No,” he said honestly. “Most vamps, even a Master, are in their lairs by now, weakened and needing rest. You don’t look weakened, or in need of rest.”

“So no need to rush out and buy a coffin, huh?” she quipped. “This doesn’t make any sense. He bit me, and he made me drink. After that, my body felt like it was going to explode every time my heart beat. If Masters need to take their rest by now—whatever a Master is—then why am I still awake? Why don’t I need to crawl into a pile of graveyard dirt and sleep?”

Resting his chin on her crown, Declan laughed. “A myth. They don’t need graveyard dirt, or a coffin. Just someplace safe from sunlight. And they can cross running water, and they have a reflection.”

“So I can still see what I look like on a bad hair day? Oh, joy,” she said, laughing a little to herself. Nerves. She was strung tightly now. Declan could feel the nerves singing in her body, feel the tension in her tautly coiled muscles.

Nuzzling said hair, Declan murmured, “You always look beautiful. Sexy. Touchable.” He stroked his hand under the shirt to cup her breasts as he lowered his head to whisper, “When the sun rises, I’m going to make love to you here, with the sun shining down around us. I’ve wanted to see you like that, with the sun painting your skin gold. I want to taste you again, and suck on your tasty little clit while you come for me.” Her nipples, hard and hot, stabbed into his palms as he rolled and pinched them. Her ass was pressing back against Declan’s cock and her hips were rocking in a hungry, fevered motion.

She whimpered, hardly aware that the sun had started to make an appearance on the horizon. The lavender light slowly shifted to pink, the clouds going gold while he whispered about how it had felt with his cock snug inside her body. Trailing one hand down to her center, Declan continued to eye the horizon while he started to slide his fingers in and out of her body. Her cream coated them as he pushed back inside her channel and sought the little notch that would make her come.

And the sun was indeed painting her skin gold. Urging her forward, he guided her hands to the broad windowsill and forced her to bend over, bracing her weight on her hands, with her pert ass sticking up in the air. The shadowed cleft opened a little, revealing a tight, pink rosette, and lower, dark curls that surrounded her sex, her lips pink and swollen and gleaming wet. Taking his cock in hand, he guided it inside her tight, swollen passage as he groaned with a mixture of relief and pleasure.

Pleasure that he was inside her again.

Relief that he wasn’t going to lose her to the darkness.

And then he started to pump inside her, his hands gripping her hips and pulling her ass back to meet him. The pink rosette beckoned and he slid one hand around to coat his fingers with her cream, lubricating them before pressing the pad of his thumb against her anus. The tight ring of muscle resisted as he slowly worked it in, listening to her startled gasp, feeling the tightening in her sheath as he started to push a little inside her.

The tight little hole closed over him like silk and Declan shuddered, feeling Tori trembling under his hand, her butt quivering against his thighs as he pushed back inside her. “Do ya like that, now?”

Tori moaned in answer, feeling the flared head of his cock as it pulsed deep inside her, as he pushed down and shifted so that it was rubbing against that spot inside her with every stroke. She clenched down around it and mewled, a hot hungry little sound. She quivered when Declan eased the tip of his thumb inside her virgin ass, his own breaths leaving his body in ragged pants. The tight hot walls of her ass closed around him like a silken glove and he groaned in pleasure as the sensation triggered an early orgasm in her body.

Declan needed her too much, had needed her for too long. The feel of her going into spasms around his invading cock was incredible and he thrust himself inside her in short, furious digs as he started to come. She spasmed around his cock, her entire vagina fluttering, clenching and quivering, as a hot wash of her cream flowed from her depths and Declan flooded her with the heavy, warm wash of his semen.

They collapsed—Declan catching their weight and guiding them to the window seat—so they could catch their breath. And watch the sun rise.

“Fuck me,” he said, winded. “At some point, I’m going to be able to last more than five minutes inside you.”

She laughed weakly. “I’m not sure I could take it. But I’m game if you are,” she said willingly.

“Not right now,” he chided her, smoothing her tumbled ringlets from her face. “We’ve got some work to do.”

“Work?” she repeated.

“Hmm. Work,” he replied. “To find who did this to you, and kill him—slowly, painfully, and with great pleasure.” He was growling by the time he finished.

“Sounds good. What else?” she said, lifting her face to study him.

Looking down at her, he smiled. “Find out exactly what you are now, I’m thinking. But, for now we just need to watch the sun rise.”

So they did. “Does it hurt at all?” he asked after five or ten minutes. By now, the sun was riding high in the sky and her cheeks were a little pink.

“No,” she said slowly. “It…it itches. Like I’ve spent too much time in the sun, like sunburn feels after you’ve finally figured out you’re burned.”

“I have a friend. He’s a vampire—one who was changed against his will. Like you. He’s more than three hundred years old. Now he can tolerate small amounts of the evening sun—enough to watch the sun set again after three centuries of darkness—and it makes him itch. You already have the tolerance of a centuries old vampire.”

“This is a friend?” she said, stiffening.

“Yes. A good man, he is. He was friends with my grandfather, almost two hundred and fifty years ago. Shifters are a long-lived race. His name is Elijah Crawford. And I think you need to meet him. If anybody has answers, it’s him.

“And I trust him. He’s a friend, a good one. Eli has saved my life and my ass a time or two. It will be all right, Tori, I promise.”

CHAPTER THREE

A couple of hours later she was eyeing the massive amount of food in front of her. “Should I really try to eat all of this?”

He laughed. “Half of it is mine. I spent too much energy last night shifting back and forth so quickly. And I require more than the average human. A shifter tends to have a high metabolism. Vamps have slowed metabolism. I imagine yours will be somewhere in between.

“Just eat what appeals to you. We don’t have any answers yet. But your body already knows what it can and can’t tolerate. And you said you wanted food. Food—not blood.”

Her cheeks flushed. Watching him move around the kitchen—relaxing the way you can only relax after good hard sex with somebody you care about—she had started to forget. A little. And now she remembered. “I wasn’t trying to get you to feed me,” she said flatly. “I didn’t ask last night and wasn’t asking now.”

“I know. But we need to know what your body needs to be at your strongest. If food will do the trick, which I doubt, it makes your existence easier.”

“Easier?” she said through gritted teeth. “You call this easier?”

“Aye.Easier than it will be if you require blood for sustenance. Do you know what that will do to you, preying on others to survive? I know,” he told her, turning and pinning her with glinting green eyes. “You’ve a soft heart, Tori McAdams, even if you keep it well hidden under that tough hide you show the world. And seeing other people as food will tear at you, and destroy you. Have you thought of that?”

Yes. And that was why she felt so raw all of a sudden.

Deflated, she asked, “Am I a monster now?”

“Oh, Tori, you don’t have a monstrous bone in you.” Then he crossed over and hugged her from behind, resting his chin on her shoulder, cuddling his larger body against hers to comfort. “But don’t you think we should find out exactly what is in you?”

She ate.

A normal sized meal.

But she still felt hungry.

Her body didn’t want food though.

She could smell him, sitting across the table, warm, sexy male. His blood throbbed in his veins and she could hear it, could hear the steady pounding of his heart, the soft whooshing as blood flowed through his body. Her eyesight— sonofabitch—had improved as well. She could have done without seeing the large vein in his neck that pulsed and fluttered and beckoned.

Lifting the glass of water to her mouth, she sipped, desperate to wet her dry mouth.

“What about orange juice?” she asked suddenly. Lowering the glass, she stared at him with a puzzled frown. “If the acid in it is what made my blood so distasteful, will it hurt me?”

“It was the garlic that made it distasteful, I’d say. The juice just made it uncomfortable to swallow. Garlic is almost like holy water to a vampire, or like sulfuric acid is to a human. So after you burned his throat with the garlic, he had all the acidic blood on top of that. I imagine you hurt him pretty damn badly. But just the juice? I imagine it is like drinking orange juice when you have a cut in your mouth.” He quirked a blond brow her way and said, “Do you want to find out?”

She hesitated, wrinkling her nose and asked, “Will it hurt me?”

“Maybe physically.” Then he grinned and said, “But it won’t kill you. It’s not holy water.”

Horror rushed across her face. “Am I damned now?”

Declan shook his head, his smile fading. “If you truly believe in God, then how can you ask? You didn’t ask for this, didn’t court it. You’ve done no evil, Tori. Would God punish somebody who is innocent, because of something that was forced on him?”

She slumped in her chair. Rubbing her fingers across her brow, she said wearily, “This is too much. Too much has happened, too many things have changed.”

“All right. I can always add some vodka to the orange juice,” he offered.

A tired laugh escaped her lips. “A screwdriver sounds rather tempting,” she said. “Come on. Let’s get it over with.”

It didn’t hurt. The juice slid down her throat easily, and she savored the sweet taste on her tongue. “Why is everything so much more vivid now?” she asked, draining the glass.

“Vampires have enhanced senses,” he replied. “But that’s not what you want either.”

She flushed. “You noticed.”

“When you’re eyeing me like a bedtime snack, it’s hard not to notice,” he said, shrugging. “If it were only in the hedonistic sense, it would be flattering. Right now, it just is. We’ll handle it.

“Can you sleep?”

She frowned, trying to follow his rapid change of topic while she adjusted to just how well he could read her. And she imagined he had always been able to read her that well. Without answering, she asked a question of her own. “Are your senses as heightened?”

“Some are even more so,” he answered, a bit cautiously it seemed. “Why?”

“Which ones?”

“Ah, smell. Hearing. You, well, most vamps are a little stronger, but I am faster, more agile.”

“Smell?”

“Why are you asking?”

Meeting his eyes, she said, “You read me a little well for my own comfort. How?”

He lifted his shoulders slowly. “Your expressions. Your heart rate picks up when you’re nervous. I know you are still hungry, because of the way you keep looking at me, then away. And you keep licking your lips, like you always did when I stopped by with something from Cinnabon,” he said, grinning faintly, the dimples in his cheeks deepening to slashes as his mouth curved up. “Your scent changes a little with your nerves, your anger, and your emotions.”

“Changes?” Her voice squeaked a little. Clearing her throat, she asked, “Changes how?”

Now his grin was wider, and wicked. He had figured out why she was asking. His soft green eyes didn’t look so soft now; more wild and dark and green—hungry and hot.

“Changes.” He paced around her, much like a wolf circling his prey. Each circle brought him closer, until he was brushing her body with his every time he moved. “When you’re aroused, you smell…hot. I know that scent. I’ve smelled it on you nearly every time we’ve been together. I heard it every time your breath caught in your throat, every time your heart kicked up, how you’d grow wet with wanting. I’ve wanted nothing more at times than to bury my face between your pretty legs and eat. But you always pushed me away.

“It drove me mad, knowing you wanted me, knowing you didn’t want to.” Moving behind her, he gripped her hips and rocked his rigid cock against her ass—naked under the shirt.

“It made me want to howl, made me want to take you down to the floor and fuck you until you couldn’t see straight. Until we collapsed—both of us.”

His hands came up and caressed her aching breasts, fondling and tweaking the nipples while she whimpered and moved against him, thrusting her tits into his hands, and her bottom against his shaft. “And the nerves. When you are turned on and wanting me—like I want you—you get nervous, worried that I will see. And it smells sweet, and innocent, like rain in the spring. That was what kept me from pushing, knowing how nervous you were, how torn. I knew something kept you from letting me close, even though you wanted me.

“And it hurt you, confused you. So I made myself not push,” he finished, jerking her shirt up and baring her ass. He smoothed his hands down the rounded white globes, squeezing and stroking, feeling the tense muscles just below her skin that quivered with every touch. Then he turned her around and lifted her naked butt onto the edge of the counter, moved between her thighs and freed his cock.

“Look at you,” he muttered thickly while he spread her legs wide, exposing the wet folds of her body—pink and damp—the curls that covered her mound, her long torso, her breasts covered by the shirt and one button. With a jerk, the button popped off and her heaving chest was revealed—her white tits with dark pink nipples, already erect. “Such a pretty sight. You’re so wet,” he mused as he slid his hands behind her ankles, up her calves to her knees.

Declan hooked her knees over his elbows, and forced her weight back. Tori fell back, catching her weight on her palms while he spread the lips of her pussy and slowly slid in, working the thick, hard length of his cock inside her swollen, wet tissues. She watched—watched as the flared head speared her entrance, cleaving through her sheath until he was lodged in, the head of his cock nudging against her womb. He pulled out until just the head rested inside her before he drove it back into her.

She could hear herself whimpering, panting, as she watched him slide his flesh inside her. The thick column of flesh was ruddy, gleaming with her cream, smooth and perfectly formed. He surged back inside and Tori sobbed as she watched him, her belly and womb going into spasms at the erotic sight.

Listened while he whispered about the scent her body gave off while he was inside her, and she felt the tension already coiling. He continued to whisper and croon to her as he buried himself to the hilt—the head of his penis, lodged against the mouth of her womb. “I’ve wondered, darlin’, how it would feel t’be inside of your sweet body. No fantasy comes close, you’re so tight, and hot, and wet,” he crooned as he trailed one hand down the back of her thigh, lifting her hips just a little more and forcing her torso further back.

She flinched when she felt his thumb probing her ass. And she flushed, remembering how fucking good it had felt when he had slid it just a little inside her earlier.

“I know you like that,” he whispered. “Your heart rate just kicked up, and your scent changed even more. It keeps getting stronger the hotter you get. Like this.” And he buried his thumb inside, the lubrication that had slid from her vagina downward easing his way past the tight ring of muscle.

Shocked, surprised at the abrupt second penetration, she cried out. A lightning bolt seemed to streak from her ass, to her clit, to her womb and she bore down, and came around him in the span of seconds, and then started moving and whimpering and pleading for more.

He shifted, pulled and they traded positions, her kneeling astride him, facing away, her ass open and exposed while he set her to rocking on his cock. He then gathered more of her cream and slid his index finger inside her anus. She heard him curse roughly and mutter, “So fucking tight. Like silk.”

But she couldn’t concentrate. She rode him hard, forcing all her weight down on his cock with all her strength, until they were fucking each other with bruising force and she gloried in it. A second climax tore through her and he grunted, sliding a second finger inside her clinging ass while gripping her hip with his other hand, grinding his cock inside her every time she slid down.

He cried out and bucked beneath her, lifting both their bodies from the cool tile floor and clenched his hand on her hip when she reached down to cup his balls. Tori rolled the warm, furry sac in her hand, before trailing her fingers down and stroking the bare, sensitive patch of skin just below his balls.

His hands slid up her torso, closing over her waist, holding her still, and he pushed up into her as she stroked his sac again. Tori heard him moan and felt his cock jerk inside her, and she squeezed gently. He moved under her like lightning, shifting her onto her knees, him gripping her hips and pummeling into her, panting and swearing hoarsely, the rounded head of his cock passing over the bed of nerves buried by the mouth of her womb.

He started to come, filling her with hot wet spurts of semen, and she went into spasms around his cock seconds later, drawing his climax out until they both thought it would kill them.

Moments later, he collapsed against her back and eased to the floor, rolling them to their sides. Declan whispered into her hair, “When you come, with me inside you, your body gives off another scent and it marks you—marks me. We belong together, Tori. And I’m keeping you.”

She had every intention of keeping him as well.

He had ushered her into bed, drawing the curtains and cutting off the light that seemed unbearably harsh so close to mid morning. For a while, he would sleep next to her, he had promised. So she drifted into a sleep deeper than any she had ever known, her belly, head and heart full.

And the hunger inside was briefly sated.

She could feed off the energy from sex as well.

Not for long. It wouldn’t hold her the way a kill would. Or even a good steady feeding.

But it had sated the monster inside her. Declan could scent it on her skin as she slid into slumber—the scent of deep, complete satisfaction—and he could see it in the small replete smile on her lovely face.

Declan took some comfort in knowing there was yet another way to help hold the hunger at bay. Vampires were psychic creatures, and some could feed from emotion almost as if it were blood. All vamps required some blood to be at optimum and Declan was sure Tori would as well, no matter how different she was proving to be.

She was tolerating the sunlight, food, taking sex without taking blood, and being sated with it.

Different than other vampires. Aye, she was different. He had been friends with Elijah Crawford for years, and had met a number of vamps through Elijah who were just trying to live as peacefully as one who lusted for blood could. Damnation knows he had fucked a number of the ladies. It wasn’t an easy thing to admit, but he liked lovers who were other than human. Declan liked knowing that his strength and hunger for sex wouldn’t hurt his partner.

And of those women, not one of them had ever been able to come without taking blood.

That was one of the things he loved about a human lover. Though he had to be a little more careful, they had simple basic hungers. Sex. Well, the commitment word, but a smart man knew to avoid those women unless he was serious.

Human lovers only wanted sex, a night of lovemaking, some companionship. Another shifter—especially another wolf—tended to start leading him down the path of packdom. And vampires always wanted to feed.

A guy only had so much blood.

Tori still seemed a little human, though. She had been able to come without the taste of blood, had been able to shake off the bloodlust easier than a newly turned vamp could have managed.

It wasn’t a big thing, not really. Hell, Declan didn’t mind spilling a little blood if the woman he was with was worth it. There was very little that could compare to a vampire lover, outside of another like himself.

And he was solitary. Few of the other wolves he knew would dare risk their leader’s wrath by sharing his bed. It had been nearly four years since he had been with another shifter and that had been only one night, a were from the pack in Chicago. A true were—one who couldn’t fight the call of the moon.

Alana had been one of the Alpha females, in a pack where the Alpha females outnumbered the Alpha males. The pack leader was a little nervous about letting too many strong men into his pack, fearful of any challenges that might come.

He had known and trusted—to an extent—Declan for some time, and knew he wouldn’t make a challenge. So Declan hadn’t been the least bit concerned when Alana had leaped through his window in her silvery wolfen form, joining him in bed.

Not concerned until Alana had started whispering what an extraordinary Alpha pair they would make. It would be easy to dispatch the pack leader. Or they could find another territory.

Everybody feared an Inherent. They could rule as they chose, live as they chose, where they chose.

Declan hated pack politics.

Hated the were and shifters who thought they could live by their own rules, hunt whom they chose, and never pay the price. There were far too many monsters among the shifters, both the were and the Inherent—those born with the ability to change at will, to go months or weeks without shifting.

Hated the stupid, primitive rules some Alphas expected their packs to live by. Hated how the stronger wolves had treated those weaker than themselves.

He had his reasons for not running with a pack.

Reasons he had walked away from his own.

He made a call and spoke with Cy. Requested—and after much bullying—was granted some personal time. It had taken bribing his boss with his season tickets to the last of the upcoming basketball games. March madness was very effective, when it came to getting the week he had requested.

Seeing as how the Cards were winning, Cy had just about started crying when Declan offered that bribe.

He wasn’t leaving Tori, until this was good and solved.

It was far too early for Eli to be awake.

And he couldn’t leave.

Not with the feral still out there. If he decided to start looking for his new offspring, Declan had to be here when the sun set.

She woke way before sunset, climbing from bed and yawning, rubbing the side of her neck, feeling smooth flesh where there had been scarred tissue only hours earlier.

“Awake already?”

She had known he was there. God, she woke smelling his flesh—that sweet male scent—and the spice of his blood that flowed beneath his smooth skin.

Slowly, she turned and met his eyes. “Looks like. I feel…good. Well, as good as you can expect for somebody who has been dead for a few days,” she said, rubbing her arms.

He smiled. “You are not dead, Tori. You’re just a little more than human now.”

“And the man who did this?”

“He’s not exactly dead either. But he’s no longer human.” He moved closer, grabbing a soft chenille throw from the foot of the bed and draping it over her shoulders. “A true, full vampire doesn’t feel the cold of a late evening in early spring. Or the heat of a sultry night in August,” he told her, using the warmth of his hands to chase the goose bumps from her body. “A true vampire can’t have a climax without drawing a little blood. And most, even the ones who aren’t feral, don’t mind some pain thrown in.

“They cannot eat food, even though the older ones can tolerate liquids. A full Master learns to tolerate bits of the evening sun, when it is at its weakest.” Reaching up, he laid the pad of his thumb against her neck and said, “And a vampire’s heart can only beat so many times. It takes too much energy, and would drain him, if it beat as steadily as yours.”

“So if I am not a full vampire, but a little more than human, exactly what am I?” she asked, reaching up and covering his hand with hers.

“I imagine you are a bit like me,” he mused. Lifting his eyes, he met hers and said, “A hybrid.”

He watched as her brows lowered over her eyes, as her mouth pursed briefly before she repeated, “A hybrid. Exactly what would make me a hybrid? And how are you a hybrid?”

“My mother was human, although she had the blood of shifters, both were and inherent through both sides in her blood. My father was a shifter born, able to control his form from the time he was thirteen. His father had been a were, and pack leader. His mother was an inherent shifter. After they died, my father was made pack leader, being the eldest son of the pack leader.

“He led them for many years, alone. And then he came to America on business, and met my mother. They fell in love and married within one week of meeting each other. She went to Ireland with him, was taken rather reluctantly into the pack. I was born three years later.

“We left Ireland when I was ten. Ireland was too small for the pack. It was growing—even as rare as our kind are—it was growing. And Ireland still believes in myths and magic. It was getting too challenging to remain hidden. And too many people had gone missing. Da had a few feral were in the pack and he executed them. They had started hunting humans.

“After the execution, he felt it was wiser to move the pack. The pack was given the choice to go, or stay. The majority went with him. Wolves feel loyalty to a rather extreme degree, and even though they were reluctant, they went.”

“But one of his seconds decided after we left Ireland that we should have stayed and gone back to the old ways—hunting whom we chose, trying to infect as many as we could. He kept his wishes quiet, not wanting Da to know he was trying to change the pack’s mind. He gained a few followers. He talked of how Da was trying to make them human again, to weaken them. How he had taken a human woman instead of another wolf. And he had a whelp who was just human. Neither inherent or were.

“They killed him because he wouldn’t live as an animal, because he took a human as his wife, and because I wasn’t a shifter. They thought.

“The night they killed him, he was ambushed by men he thought were loyal to him. They also killed my mother that night. Broke her neck and left her lying in bed, like she wasn’t worthy of anything more.

“I was sixteen, and away from home on a camping trip with a friend. They sent only three of the younger Alphas to take care of us. I was just human, you know. No true danger—not against three fully grown weres. One went after Cy, and the other two came after me.

“Cy? Your partner, Cy? He knows?”

“Yes. The one who went after him left him for dead, thinking he had gutted him. Cy spent the entire summer in the hospital recovering.” He paused, reflecting. “The were that attacked him left without ensuring Cy was dead because he heard something, felt, and smelled trouble. Most weres can’t change unless it is close to the full moon. And a were never has his first change until the full moon is overhead. But the were heard something.

“He heard someone bellowing the way they do until they learn to control the pain the change can cause. It was me.”

“You.”

“Aye. One of the were bit me. That’s how you become a were, you see. It’s rare. If a thousand people were bitten, only five or ten would become were. And some don’t survive the first change. The infection, or curse—whatever you want to call it—passes from one generation to the next through the men. The women who get bitten don’t get pregnant. It sterilizes them somehow. A man who has been bitten and becomes a werewolf has about a fifty-fifty chance of passing it on to his children.

“Inherent shifters, like my grandmother, are even rarer. And they are the most feared. An inherent is one of the few things an Alpha were will fear. If an inherent enters an Alpha’s territory without permission, without warning, one of the first things the Alpha will try to do is kill that inherent, because if that inherent wants it, he will be pack leader. He is dominant, even among the dominant Alpha werewolves.”

“Why?”

He looked down. “The inherent has so few weaknesses. The animal is his to call, as he chooses. It costs him little energy to shift—whenever—as often as he chooses. He doesn’t feel the call of the moon and if an inherent chooses, he can resist the change for months on end.”

“And this is important because…?”

“To resist the siren call of the moon is the ultimate power. The were struggle for control—to control their impulses as the moon draws nearer, to resist the need to hunt. The need to hunt repulses almost as much as it entices. The inherent doesn’t have that battle.”

“So what are you—were or inherent?”

“You’ve been with me on nights of the full moon before,” he reminded. And so they had, a number of times, meeting to exchange information or running into each other by chance. And once on a stakeout.

“So you are inherent.”

“I’m both.”

“Both?”

“Aye. Ma had the blood of an inherent, and Da was a were. I feel the call of the moon, but I can answer or ignore it as I wish. I control the animal at all times. It doesn’t control me.”

“But you hadn’t ever changed before. What happened?”

Declan smiled, rather bitterly. “I was infected. I fought back, and I was stronger than they had expected me to be. I hadn’t ever been fully human, despite what we all thought.

“They weren’t able to kill me. Two weres against one should have worked—except I was more powerful—a true wolf. Inherent wolves are almost always dominant to a were, and they didn’t realize what they had caused. One of them was a powerful Alpha and could change shape at will. He changed and bit me. And that is what caused me to change. There were inherent gifts inside me, but they had never been tapped. When he bit me—”

“He tapped them. He set those traits loose, and you were able to shift.”

“Yes. I shifted, and I…was able to get away,” he finished after a brief pause. He wasn’t ready to tell her about the other trait that many of the more powerful inherents had—the one that made all Alphas fear the inherent in their midst—the gift of fear, the ability to radiate a ferocious fear that could paralyze the mind and body.

“I found one of my father’s seconds—one who was loyal—and he kept me hidden until William Murphy—the one who had betrayed my father—went to take his place as pack leader. He had the proof that he had killed my father, and he was under the impression that I had been done away with.”

“Why kill you?”

“As long as I was alive William couldn’t claim that he was rightful leader. Even though I had never changed, I was the son of the leader. Tradition and pack law were things the pack lived by. If a wolf wanted the old leadership gone, he had to kill the leader’s entire blood family, from his mate down to the grandchildren.”

“Killing children, lovely,” Tori whispered, grimacing. Her skin had gone pale again, and her eyes were wide and a dark, turbulent blue—troubled. “What proof?”

“You don’t really want to know, do you?”

“I think maybe I need to. I’m trying to follow this, and I know it’s unpleasant, but I think I need to know.”

“His heart. They had torn the heart out of my father’s body. William would take it before the pack, let them smell—smell my father—and then he would eat it.”

Tori blanched, wheeling away and pressing her face to the cool pane of glass as she battled nausea. Declan stood behind her, his clenched fists shoved deep into his pockets while he breathed slowly—through his nose, out of his mouth—battling down the helpless rage.

“They met only a few days later. He wanted them under his control before the next full moon because he intended to lead a rampage. He intended to start hunting the way the were hunted centuries ago. Hunting humans.”

He turned away, sighing. Reaching up, he rubbed his hand over the back of his neck, rolling it in effort to relieve the tension. “I was only sixteen, but I was my father’s son. He had been a good man, an honorable one. And he did his best to raise me that way. And I was still all too human. A lot of weres lose some of their humanity when they change. I never did. The thought of hunting people for sport, when the urge to hunt can be overcome, sickened me.

“I had been in the shadows and when he started telling the pack how things would be, I wanted to go out. But Aidan kept me back. I’m not sure what he was waiting for, but he made me wait.”

“And then William’s people brought forth this little Styrofoam cooler and took this bloody pulp from it. It was the men who had led the ambush when my father was killed—they all stood around, almost smiling—they were fucking proud as they held this bloody pulp like some prize. And I smelled it, my father’s blood. I lost control, well, maybe not lost. I never tried to stop it. I shifted and charged out of the shadows where Aidan was holding me and tore through the crowd. The pack scattered, and they all cowered. I killed them, the men who had ambushed my father. Aidan had already rounded up the men loyal to my family and they cornered William while I ripped out the throat of one. The other took off running. I think he thought I was my father. I jumped on him and shifted before I snapped his neck.”

His hands ached. Looking down, he flexed them. “They had killed a good man. I can’t say I regret killing them. But I think I hated them more because I had to kill them. Killing them changed something inside me. Something that even being bitten by a were could not have touched. Killing them cost me more of my humanity than anything else has.” He could still feel it, still feel the hot rush of blood as he bit down through warm, struggling flesh. Feel the pop as he snapped the bones in the neck. That had started him down the road he was still walking, decades later, and though he didn’t regret the choices he had made, he often wondered what it would have been like, if he hadn’t been infected.

Two hands came down and covered his, wrapping them and lifting them upward until she could press a kiss to each palm. “If it hadn’t hurt you inside, then it would mean you were just as twisted as they were,” she said softly, wrapping her arms around him and cuddling her body to his.

“I had to kill William as well. Not that I hadn’t wanted to, but after I killed the second man, I lost some of the anger, and I could feel them all, feel their hunger, their terror, their excitement. I killed him. And then I walked away.”

“Walked away?”

“I am solitary. I run with no pack. I left them there in the clearing and told Aidan I wanted no part of them. Their politics are why my father died. Da was trying to change things. And things were getting better, would have been better still. But the pack was lazy. They didn’t want to learn control, didn’t want to change.”

“Then that just means they are still more human than they want to think. Humans hate change. Hate trying the unknown.” She led him to the broken down recliner in the corner and curled up on his lap. “Why are you telling me all of this?”

Running one hand down her back, savoring the warmth of her flesh under the silk shirt she had snagged from his closet, Declan said, “I do not know what it is like to live with the monster you now have inside you. But I understand not being completely human. You’re not alone.”

He could feel her smile against his chest, feel the warm caress of her breath through the shirt he wore when she whispered, “I know.”

When her body shifted and straddled his, he thrust his hips up, rubbing his hardening length across her exposed folds. The ripening scent of her body beckoned him as he reached up and grabbed the shirt she wore, jerking until it fell from her smooth white shoulders in shreds. She laughed and stroked her hands up until she could cup her breasts, rubbing her thumbs against her reddened nipples before one hand went down to pluck and stroke her clit.

“Bloody hell,” he hissed as he watched the play of her long slim fingers on her flesh—working her body closer to climax. He could smell her—peaches, sex—growing stronger as her arousal grew. He lifted her with one hand, trapping her fingers between them as she started to slide them inside her wet vagina. She laughed as he tore his jeans open before catching the cheeks of her ass in his hands.

“What’s your hurry?” she asked, leaning forward to press her lips against his in a slow, tender kiss while she resisted the pull of his hands. “I want to taste you.”

His hands paused, hesitated and fell away as she leaned down. But it wasn’t his neck she was going for. Her hot, wet mouth trailed lower and lower until she shifted out of the chair to kneel in front of him. Wrapping one hand around the base of his shaft, she gave a low hmmm of approval before she leaned forward and daintily licked from root to tip. Taking that fat flared head that enticed her so into her mouth, she suckled on it before pulling away to stare up at Declan. “I’ll try to do this without nicking you this time,” she murmured before she took his length down her throat, again, and again—until Declan’s hands closed over the arms of the chair and his nails tore into the fabric as he struggled not to come in the wet cave of her mouth.

His cock head lodged down her throat, blocking her air briefly before she figured out she really didn’t need to breathe as much as she once had. Keeping him there, she rocked back and forth slightly, shuddering with pleasure as the low groan vibrated from his chest throughout his body.

Through the shield of her lashes she looked upward, staring up the length of his body, at his quivering belly, the shuddering of his chest as he struggled to breathe, the fine sheen of sweat that covered those yummy muscles, up the line of his throat to stare at his face.

His lashes were lowered to half-mast, his lips parted, a look of half bliss, half torture on his face. Sliding back down, she savored the smooth, thick length in her mouth, the salty taste of his skin, the pulse of life just underneath. Her lungs started to ache just a little and she pulled away, took a breath and lapped at the underside of his cock before taking it back into her mouth.

He hissed again when one of her canines grazed his flesh. Jerking away, she whispered, “I’m sorry.”

Declan seized her head and guided it back to his cock, to the tiny drop of blood that beaded along the shaft. “Again,” he whispered roughly, slipping his thumb inside her and opening her mouth. “Again.” When her mouth closed over his cock, he groaned in ecstasy. Her tongue sought and soothed the tiny nick while she suckled on him, eagerly lapping up the scant amount of blood before she went back to taking his length down her throat.

One hand buried and twisted itself into her tumbled hair, while his other hand went to cup his balls as she relaxed the muscles in her throat until she had taken as much of him down her throat as she could. Unable to stop, he reared up, clasped her head in both hands and pumped his hips, shoving his cock in and out as hot spurts of come pulsed from his cock into the wet silk of her throat.

His hands fell from her scalp, half numb, and she started to pull back, allowing his semi-hard cock to slip from her grasp—pausing to swab it with her tongue before she went to nibble and suckle on the head of his dick, probing the small hole at the tip with her tongue for a few seconds—then lifting her head to stare at him.

“You taste good,” she murmured, pressing a kiss to his flat belly before settling back on her heels and staring up at him, her hands pressed together between her knees.

He lifted heavy lids to stare at her as she knelt in front of him. He reached for her and drew her onto his lap, his cock starting to twitch as he smelled her. Fuck, she was even more turned on now than she had been before she started. Cupping her pussy in his hand, he discovered she was wet—wetter than she had been before she’d gone down on him.

“Ride me,” he whispered roughly, guiding her wet entrance down until the tip of his shaft was encased in her tight little sheath.

Hooking her ankles behind his back, her arms around his shoulders, she obeyed, rolling and rocking against him lazily as he took the tip of her breast in his mouth, capturing the hard nub of her nipple between his teeth. Her walls clenched tightly on him, making him groan and she laughed, repeated it over and over again.

Behind her, he started to probe the entrance of her ass. She went stiff, lifting her head to stare down at him. Her eyes were foggy and slitted with lust, but Declan sensed the reluctance inside her. “What bothers you about this?” he asked, easing his index finger inside until it was seated down to the webbing of his fingers. “It’s just sex, someplace I could put my cock and have you coming like you’ve never done before.”

She started to shake her head no but then he rolled his hips as he pulled his finger back and slid it home again. “That feel good?” he purred when her eyes flew wide and then fluttered closed. “You’re so tight,” he crooned, setting his hips to a slow gentle rhythm while he finger fucked her ass, using that stimulation to bring her to climax. “It does feel good, doesn’t it, Tori?”

“Yes,” she gasped as she climaxed around him, her vaginal walls milking his cock, while the muscles in her rectum gripped his finger.

“It could feel better,” he offered when she collapsed against him.

He was still hard inside her.

She lifted her head slowly to stare down at him. “Will it hurt?” she asked breathily while he continued to move her hips against him.

“If it does tell me, and I’ll stop,” he promised, lifting her from him. He came free from her with a soft, wet, sucking sound and deposited her in the chair before he left the room. She eyed him warily when he returned, a tube in his hand. “Turn around,” he ordered softly after he pulled her still shuddering body to her feet.

She started to hesitate but remembered—remembered how he had hesitated when she had told him she wanted to taste him. Taste his cock, not his blood. And he had let her taste both. She turned and got down on her knees when he urged her to, bending over the chair so that it supported her torso.

He warmed whatever lubricant he had retrieved between his palms before coating her anus and then his cock. She jumped when he started to probe and heard him laugh as he slid into her body, spreading her labia and driving his length into her until he was fully seated.

Into her stretched, swollen sheath while he started to spear her anus with his fingers, like he had been doing earlier. She quivered under his hands and whimpered when he leaned over to whisper in her ear.

“I’ve dreamed of this,” he told her in his low, smoky voice with its faint hint of Ireland. “Dreamed of riding you, of eating you up in three greedy bites. Dreamed of coming inside your mouth and your bottom. Push down.”

She did and gasped when he easily slid two fingers inside her bottom.

“We can stop there, for now, if that’s what you want,” he murmured, bracing one hand low on her spine while he slid those two fingers in and out of her anal passage, his cock filling her sheath.

But she panted and twisted under his hands and whispered, “More.” It wasn’t enough. It felt too good, too damn good, to stop there. “More, Declan.”

He paused and held still inside her. She squirmed and lifted her ass, silently begging. She started to quake moments later when the broad head of his cock replaced his fingers.

The dark, ruddy head stretched the tender pink opening, parting her as he pushed inside, his breath catching in his chest as her tight, virginal muscles closed over him.

Slowly.

Tori heard his quick intake of breath over her hungry little moans, but she was too caught up in her own needs to wonder at it. Too slow…He was going so damn slowly she was sweating and squirming and half mad before he was even half way inside her. Bracing her hands on the floor, she snarled and shoved back, taking his entire length inside. She cried out, half in pain, half in pleasure, as she felt his cock slicing through her tight, unused tissues. His cock was hard and hot, twitching and pulsing inside her while she shuddered and twisted, trying to relieve the intense pressure that was bordering on very real pain.

“Declan, stop, it hurts…” she gasped, trying to move forward.

Declan growled warningly when she started to pull away. “Too late for that,” he rasped, reaching around and pinching her clit, sliding his fingers in and out of her pussy, bringing her back to the edge she had been teetering at before rushing and taking him in too quickly.

She squirmed and wriggled against him, pushing at his hands. “It hurts,” she whimpered, trying to pull away from the burning, burgeoning fullness in her bottom. Tears filled her eyes, her heart pounded in her chest as a sob started to rise in her throat.

“Because you went too fast,” he murmured. “Because you won’t be still and let your body adjust.” He pinned her easily, bending over and pressing her between his chest and the seat of the chair. “Your body wants this, Tori. I can smell it, feel it. Your nipples are hard as diamonds and your heart is pounding almost as fast as mine. You’re hotter and wetter here,”—he showed her where with a clever little twist of his fingers—”than you have probably ever been. Just be still, and let me…”

He proceeded to show her, keeping his thrusts tiny and slow until her body calmed around his, the tense muscles in her ass relaxing to a silken, clinging caress around his cock.

“Feel that?” he whispered, keeping his body against hers, intentionally hampering his movement so he couldn’t ream her ass the way he wanted. The feel of those virginal muscles clenching, then relaxing around him was driving him mad. He took her hands and laid them beside her head, covering them with his, and lacing their fingers.

He pulled a little further out and thrust back in, growling in pleasure when she accepted it, accepted his cock inside her this way. “It feels good, doesn’t it?” he asked.

Her body shuddered beneath his and she moved, pushing back against him, faster, harder, and hungrier. “Yes…Declan, please.”

Declan snarled when she started to shudder and quake on his impaling cock. When she started to come, he growled in triumph, wrapping his arms around her and straightening, taking her body with him, hands looping beneath her thighs and bringing her knees to her chest, holding her writhing form open and wide for his cock. He took her hard—in deep, driving digs—and he howled when she started to come again.

Cream dripped from her, sliding down to wet his shaft further, easing his penetration even more. He fought his own climax, unwilling to let this end so soon. He kept her pinned against him with one iron arm banding her around the waist. The other he used to shove her hair aside, his head swooping down and raking her exposed flesh with his sharp teeth.

“More,” he ordered in a low, silken throb while he continued to ream her ass. She shook her head and pushed against him, which only drove her further and harder down. He caught her clit between his thumb and forefinger and pinched, tweaked, and tortured until she started to sob again.

“More,” he repeated, shifting, turning, shoving her body to the floor and crouching over her. He used his hands to guide hers where he wanted them—one hand stroking and pinching her nipples, the other hand between her thighs, masturbating. Then he braced his hands flat, and stretching them both out on the floor proceeded to fuck her the way he wanted.

This was his weakness. Not the yearning for the moon, nor the urge to hunt, not the need to taste warm flesh in his mouth, but Tori—spread out and open, taking him wherever he wanted and however he wanted. Taking his cock down her throat, or taking his cock in her ass, as often as he wished, however he wished. The need for sex that rode his back—his own personal demon—had focused solely on this woman and he had been waiting since he had first laid eyes on her.

Sweat dripped from them as he forced her into a third, and a fourth climax. He rose back up, keeping her prone on the floor while he crouched between her thighs, spreading the cheeks of her ass with his hands and watching as she took his cock, as she took him. The tight ring of muscle relaxed and she opened to take his cock back in every time he pulled out. The smooth, satiny skin of her butt, the way her slender torso rested against the floor, the faint cries she muffled against the chair arm, all it of drove him insane.

He covered her again when he felt his climax approaching. He bit into his wrist until he felt and tasted blood, then shoved it to her mouth, “Feed,” he growled in her ear. “Suck me hard.” He wrapped his free arm around her so that she was pinned, arms against her sides, his weight keeping her thighs open and spread.

Her tongue lashed out, catching the blood as she drew on his flesh, falling into a rhythm that mimicked the one he was performing on her. Tori couldn’t handle it, the fast, brutal digs in her ass and the hot spicy wash of blood in her mouth as she fed. She exploded, screaming and bucking beneath him, fighting his confining grip. She bore down and climaxed around him a fifth and final time as her fangs slid out and into his flesh, as he released the bonds on his control and jetted his seed inside her.

“Son of a bitch,” Tori whispered weakly a little while later. “We’re going to kill each other.” She daintily licked his wrist one last time before snuggling against his chest.

Feeling slightly sluggish, satisfaction coursing through him with every pounding beat of his heart, he grunted in agreement. “But can you think of a better way to go?”

CHAPTER FOUR

Tori followed Declan out into the coming twilight. The sun still shone high on the western horizon, but in the east, clouds and the coming darkness were starting to gather. She paused by the car, standing still and feeling the sun on her face, warming her.

“I can’t imagine how awful it would be to live in total darkness,” she murmured as the sun started to paint the sky in vivid reds, pinks and golds as it neared the horizon.

“Neither can I,” Declan replied quietly, resting one hand on her lower back. He cuddled her against him and watched the sun set with her before urging her into the car. “We need to be going. I left a message with Eli’s people that we are coming. It will take a while to get there.”

“Where does Eli live?”

“West Virginia. I had planned on leaving earlier, but some wanton lady kept seducing me,” he said blandly, snapping his seat belt into place.

She slid him a sideways glance and shifted a bit uncomfortably on the seat. Her bottom hurt, just slightly, a vague ache of muscles never used in such a way.

And her entire pelvic area felt bruised, in a rather lovely kind of way. “Not exactly the way I remember it,” she drawled, pulling one foot under her to support her weight and relieve some of the pressure on her ass.

Declan saw it and flushed slightly. He started the car before leaning over and pulling her to the middle of the seat. He bussed her mouth sweetly before nuzzling her neck. “I can’t help it.” He stroked her back with possessive hands. “You cannot know how much I’ve been needing you. Aching for you.”

He kissed her, sliding his tongue inside her mouth and groaning with satisfaction as her taste flooded him. Moments passed before he started to pull back, nibbling at her lower lip, pressing a kiss to her jaw as he cruised up to her ear. “I’ve one true obsession,” he told her. “Since I changed that first time, sex is the one thing that rides me, the need to fuck, and do it often. But since I met you, you are the only woman I have wanted, and I haven’t touched another woman in nearly six months. I thought I was going to go mad.” He returned to her mouth and kissed her roughly, greedily, as though he feared she would disappear into the coming night.

Her fingers pressed against his head and she whimpered, straining against him, squirming against him. Only when she was panting and losing all ability to think, did Declan shove the urge to mate aside. Her safety first, that was what mattered.

He pulled back and met her eyes levelly. “I know it’s not the best of times for you right now. We need answers, and we need you to be someplace safe. But we’re needing to talk about this. I don’t think I can let you go.”

Her eyes dropped, a slow burn starting inside her heart. Curling her fingers around his healing wrist, she pressed a kiss to the scars that were already fading. “I can’t think about that right now,” she said honestly. “But I really can’t see me leaving either.”

She kissed him softly and wrapped her arms around his neck, twisting awkwardly in the seat to press her body to his. She felt a soft caress of her hair as he sighed into the tumbled brown ringlets, squeezing her tightly before releasing her. “Come. Let’s go find some answers,” he murmured, setting the car in motion.

“How are you feeling?” It was past midnight, nearly three hours had passed and they were well into the mountains of West Virginia, traveling down the interstate under the light of the quarter moon that hung in the sky.

Declan had driven like a bat out of hell, covering hundreds of miles in only a few hours.

The wonders of being a cop, she mused. If he had been pulled over, just flashing his badge would get him out of it. It wouldn’t have been the first time she had seen it.

Then she frowned, and concentrated on his question. He wasn’t asking in general, she knew. “Hungry,” she finally answered, her pale cheeks going scarlet.

She wondered if he could tell in the darkness of the car, touching one hot cheek with the tips of her fingers. Most likely. She could tell a change in her own scent and after the explicit explanation of how well he could smell…Well,

She wasn’t going to be able to hide things from her wolf.

My wolf, she mused. I kinda like the sound of that.

“Most vamps, when they are newly turned, go slightly mad with hunger at first,” Declan said quietly, his voice grim. “Something kept you from that, probably you filling your body with regular food which interfered with the purging process. I am thinking that you somehow changed your metabolism and kept the change from completing.”

“Slightly mad from hunger?”

“Hmm. They can’t control the thirst for blood, you see,” he told her, flicking a brief glance her way. “It’s aggravated because the purging process and the change going on inside drains the body of resources it really doesn’t have to spare. So when a newly turned vamp wakes, it’s not too far from starvation anyway. All it wants to do is feed.

“You changed your body’s metabolism, is what I’m thinking. But, you still have those needs.” Tori watched as he sighed in frustration. “We’re going to have to get you a heavy feeding, Tori. I can lose more blood than a human without suffering, but I’ve heard of newly turned vamps that can drain a person a night for close to a month before the urges can be controlled. Older vampires can’t even ingest that much blood, but new vamps need it. We have to get you fed.”

“And how am I supposed to do this?” she asked miserably. She couldn’t feed off a person. She couldn’t.

“I imagine Eli will have a solution,” he said, laying his hand on her thigh.

“One of his people will be more than happy to donate some blood. That will help until we find a more permanent solution.

“Such as?”

He shrugged.

“You’ve got an idea about what can do that,” she said, narrowing her eyes. “I can tell.”

He sighed in the darkness, flexing his hands around the steering wheel while he stared hard at the road. “Some people deserve death, Tori,” he said.

“What are you saying?” she asked softly, drawing her knees to her chest and staring miserably out the window.

“We’ll get to that later,” he said obscurely, taking an exit and following a road that led high into the mountains.

“I’d rather get to it now,” she said flatly.

“Later. We’re getting close.”

Whatever Tori had been expecting, it hadn’t been this, the towering wooden construction that perched on the face of a cliff, overlooking one of the deep valleys. Right now, the many windows sparkled under the silvery moon, reflecting the white light back at them as Tori climbed from the car. In the day, it would nearly flame from all the sunlight that would pour through it.

“Ah, isn’t that a little…open?” she asked, wondering how the vampire inside managed to keep away from the sunlight in such a house.

“Eli likes keeping his people happy,” was all Declan said as he led her to the door. He had been waved through the gate nearly a hundred yards back and Tori was fairly certain she heard other people out there.

“His people,” she repeated. There were other buildings. Several smaller average sized houses, like guesthouses, scattered here and there. She could smell chlorine and suspected a pool was somewhere close as well.

And life.

She could smell the hot rich scent of life beyond those doors and a fine sweat broke out on her skin.

After the way Declan had spoken, she had expected somebody other than the mysterious Eli to answer the door. But she knew the minute it opened, this was the vampire.

She sensed great age, a bone deep weariness, and her head was spinning from all the emotions she was picking up on. Hunger, thirst, loneliness, chaotic flashes of painful, intense sex and years that stretched out in front of her forever, empty long years.

Staring into Eli’s eyes, eyes that were the color of old gold, she didn’t realize she was gasping for breath until Declan’s hands landed on her shoulders and he shook her.

His mouth was moving and she could hear his voice over a great distance but she couldn’t understand his words.

This confusion.

The brutal flood of emotions and thoughts and needs that weren’t her own.

And an urging.

An urging to break open a vein and feed it to this man in front of her while he fed her.

“Stop it, Eli! I brought her here for you to help her, not enslave her,” Declan growled as Tori fell away from his hands, her face white and her eyes going glassy while she stared at Eli.

Softly, Eli replied, “If she is strong enough, she won’t be enslaved.”

“She’s only just turned, damn it, it’s not a fair fight,” Declan snapped, struggling to leash the rage inside of him. Why hadn’t he known Eli would try this? After all, he was one of the few Masters, and he guarded his people and his territory ferociously.

“You can’t interfere, wolf. If you do, it won’t hold well for her. She has to find her own strength.” He continued to stare at the woman who was still fighting him. He intensified the strength of the mental command, waiting for her to fall to her knees and offer up her blood.

“She is mine,” Declan rasped, his hands flexing, his skin starting to burn and itch.

Turning his head, Eli smiled, his fangs glinting in the moonlight. “Really? Then she shouldn’t have any trouble resisting the call of another Master,” he said.

“I’m not her Master,” Declan said, his voice dropping and roughening. His jaws were starting to ache and he fought to pummel his rage into submission.

“I’m her lover and if you think I’ll let you take her, you’re wrong. I’ll behead you with my bare hands.”

“All she has to do is throw it off. Any full-fledged vamp of strength can do it.”

“She can’t. Damn it, she’s never fully fed and she’s different—”

A low cry tore from Tori, followed by a shriek of rage as she threw Eli’s compulsion off, her soft, mellow blue eyes glowing electric in the night, while she stared at the man in front of her. “Get out of my head,” she ordered softly, her voice trembling with strain.

“Hmm. What a fighter you’ve found, Declan. Young, strong, and—”

Fast.

Declan never saw her move. And apparently neither did Eli, for he flew back into the solid oak door, blood oozing from his mouth, his eyes wide and glowing with power. And shock.

Tori was standing only a few feet in front of him, massaging her knuckles. Her knuckles were torn and bleeding, and her breath was sawing in and out of her lungs.

Eli stared at her, his eyes glittering with shock and rage.

Declan tensed and prepared to spring, but Eli straightened slowly, staring at Tori with confused eyes. “Never fully fed?” Eli repeated, running his tongue along the inside of his cheek and lip, tasting the blood. It wasn’t the pain really, though it hurt like bloody hell. It was the surprise.

A newly turned vamp, even one of considerable strength, would never have been able to strike him. Even when he clamped it down, the compulsion a Master radiated kept the other, weaker vamps around him in a state of submission. It was that compulsion that gave a Master power over his people, what allowed him to rule as he wished.

How could a newly turned vamp, who—according to Declan—had never fully fed, strike him?

He caught the scent of something in the air and his eyes narrowed. Before Declan realized it, Eli had moved and was seizing Tori’s hand, staring at the blood and smelling it.

“Do you mind?” Tori snapped, trying to jerk her hand away. She couldn’t. Eli might as well have been made of steel. He held her bleeding hand in an unbreakable, strong grip.

“I smell vampire,” he whispered roughly, his fangs, protruding slightly from his anticipation of battle, slid even further out as lust and hunger started to pump through him. “But I also smell woman, human woman, sex, and wolf. If you are vampire, why do I still smell woman?”

“I am a woman?” Tori offered, relief coursing through her when Declan aligned himself at her back, wrapping one arm protectively, possessively around her waist and staring at Eli with eyes that shifted and swirled and glowed.

“Not human woman, at least you shouldn’t be,” Eli whispered. He lifted her stiff hand to his lips and licked at the trickling blood, rolling it on his tongue and swallowing, a shudder of ecstasy coursing through him. “God, what a taste.”

Reluctantly, he released her hand and stared at Declan, his eyes impassive again. “It is our way, Declan. A Master will always exert his will over any vampire who enters his ground. If I hadn’t, my own people would have wondered why. But I am sorry that I caused her distress. It was most unfair, and too much to ask of one not yet at full strength.”

Tori watched in confusion as the other man’s face went cold and impassive. “The next time you try to control her, I will kill you,” Declan promised. “Friend you may be, and we have spilled blood together time after time. But this woman holds my heart.”

Eli was handsome, almost poetically so, with wavy golden hair he kept secured in a queue at his neck, and those eyes that looked like golden coins. Tori could still feel the subtle call that he silently, and probably unconsciously, exuded.

But she didn’t feel him inside her head any more.

Not him, nor the other vampires he called his. It had been their emotions she had sensed. The link Eli had tried to force on her had gone both ways without him even realizing it, and it had given her a brief insight into the troubled, lonely mind of the Master who stood before her.

She shouldn’t have been able to resist him. It was near impossible for any newly turned vamp without a master to resist the call of a true Master.

Flicking her eyes to the window, she listened with half an ear as Declan tersely explained what had happened. Tori wasn’t certain she wanted to speak to Eli again. Wasn’t certain she wanted to risk another glimpse into his rather tortured mind.

“You fed?”

Turning her head, she blinked slowly, forcing the cobwebs from her mind. She was so fucking tired, and weak.

Incredulously, the golden vamp repeated, “You fed? You ate food?”

She nodded.

“Bloody hell, that isn’t really possible,” he told her, staring from Declan to her and back again. Something akin to jealousy appeared briefly in his eyes.

“Tell that to my stomach. I ate pancakes for breakfast,” she told him with a smirk. Her eyes narrowed as something else slid through her mind and she stared into his eyes… “And I ate some strawberries.”

Eli’s eyes went to slits and his lower lip poked out just the slightest bit…my my my…the Master Vampire pouting over strawberries. Tori snickered.

“Tori,” Declan whispered warningly.

Eli had been the dominant creature in his world for too long, and his tolerance for sarcasm was thin. But Eli only asked, “Blood? When was the first time you took blood?”

“Night before last,” they both responded, meeting each other’s eyes. Heat rolled through Tori again, chasing a little more of the fatigue away.

“Yours, Declan?” Eli asked sardonically, rubbing his jaw with the tips of his fingers. When the wolf nodded, Eli laughed. “No wonder she is so bloody fast, her first meal being a shape-shifter.”

“What does that matter?” she asked, flicking Declan a glance. But he only raised his hands and shrugged.

“A vamp, particularly a strong one, can take something of his first meal into himself. Memories, abilities. When we first change, we are like a clean slate, or a sponge. And whatever we take first is one of the things that will determine how strong we are as vamps. That is why many vamps provide the first feeding for those they sire, either their own blood, or the blood of one the vamp sought out. That way, they can start the newly turned out the way they want. And you were her first meal,” Eli finished.

Rising from where he had been sprawling on a large leather chair, he circled around Tori, an odd little smile playing at his lips. “The strength of a vampire, the thoughts and morals of a human, the speed and sexual appetite of the shifters and the vamps—my, my, my, what an odd little package you make,” he mused, his low voice still carrying a faint trace of his native England. “I wonder what your strengths will be, your weaknesses.”

“She can take the morning sun.”

Eli’s disconcerting study broke as he turned to stare at Declan. The Irishman stood just a few feet away, watching over Tori. “Impossible,” Eli said, shaking his head.

“She can take it. And she stood in the light of a new dawn with a smile on her lovely face. Impossible? You can stay awake longer, my friend. Just watch and see,” Declan offered.

“A few seconds is one thing, and maybe not so surprising, considering she somehow stopped the transformation before it could complete,” Eli said, still shaking his head. “But there is no way she could possibly tolerate—”

His voice broke off and he moved until he stood toe to toe with the wolf, glaring up at the taller man. “You swear?”

“I am no liar,” Declan said softly. “Why should I lie? I stood there, ready to pull her away if it started to burn her. She held her face up to the sun, and I watched.”

“And rejoiced, I imagine,” Eli said almost soundlessly. He turned and studied Tori with a new light in his eyes. “A vampire who can withstand the sun and take sustenance from something other than a blood vessel. I had thought such things were legend.”

“So you have heard of such things,” Declan said. “Tell us.”

Tori froze under the weight of the golden eyes that landed on her. “’Tell us,’” he repeated, mocking Declan lightly, even throwing a bit of Ireland into his English voice. “Is it ‘us’ to you as well, Tori?”

“What can you tell me?”

“Only that the ferals will fear you even more than our wolf friend. Even more than they fear me, if what I have heard is fact, and not just myth.”

“What have you heard?” she asked, her voice shaking.

But before he could answer, something seized her—black, evil, spiraling darkness that swarmed through her and blanketed her entire mind. She fell to the floor screaming, her hands to her head.

She bit down on her tongue and tasted blood and then everything went dark.

“He’s calling her,” Declan snarled, when she shot up off the floor as quickly as she fell, leaping for the glass window. He pounced and took her to the floor, pinning her struggling body.

Eli’s eyes were wide and his head thrown back. He could sense something. “I know him,” he whispered gutturally.

“Help me,” Declan said when she started to convulse underneath him.

He held her wildly struggling body, pinning her hips with his, holding her legs with his, but she was strong. Entirely too strong.

Eli’s strength joined his and they rolled to their sides, keeping her body pinioned between them. “If she cannot fight this, he will kill her for not coming to him,” Eli grunted, locking his arms with Declan’s, grinding her more tightly between them. “He will see this as disobedience. He will not see this as her not being able to come because we are stopping her. He will see it as disobedience, and he will kill her.”

Blood was starting to pour from her eyes and nose and mouth. “Fuck,” Declan rasped, lifting murderous eyes to Eli’s. Over her twitching shoulder, he shouted, “What is he doing?”

“Something only her sire could do. He gave her this life. If she is weak enough, he can end it,” Eli said through clenched teeth. “Bloody hell, she is strong.”

“Can you stop him?”

Eli closed his eyes and said, “I can try. But if it goes badly, you may wish I hadn’t.”

“Stop him,” Declan snarled.

“Hold her,” Eli ordered, pulling back slightly and then his fangs slid out and he sliced through the flesh of his wrist, and dark, dark crimson blood flowed. He held the bleeding wound to her mouth and caught her head tightly in one hand. “She needs strength. This will give her that. But if she fights him off…if she fights him, this may bind her.”

Declan pressed his face into Tori’s damp hair. “She’s bound to me,” he whispered. Over and over.

Her struggles started to slacken and he released his grip, his muscles quivering from exhaustion. “Call her,” Eli said from over her head. “Call her back, before he can snatch her again.”

The older vampire took his bleeding wrist from her mouth and licked the remaining blood away. His saliva would have it healed in minutes. “Call her, damn it. I do not open a vein for no reason,” Eli snapped.

Taking Tori’s cold face in his hands, Declan called her in the only way he could think of. He covered her slack mouth his and plunged his tongue deep inside her mouth, stroking her body with his hands and calling out to her with his mind and soul.

Spearing his fingers through her hair, he arched her face up to him and kissed his mate. “Tori…damn it girl, come to me.” She was so cold…so still. Smoothing his hands down her arms, her torso and hips, Declan focused on the slow, feeble pounding he felt inside her chest as he pulled away and kissed his way from her chin to her neck, murmuring to her, “Come back to me.”

Long moments passed and she started to warm. Then her flesh started to heat and her arms twined around his neck. He could smell her through their clothes, feel her and smell her, and the sweet ripe scent of peaches was filling the air.

The pounding of her heart became stronger, steadier as Declan grabbed the edge of her shirt and tore it from her. The lace of her bra cupped her breasts and he lowered his face to the valley between, nuzzling the smooth flesh there as he felt her hands cup his head, his name falling from her lips on a sigh.

Her fingers buried in his hair and Declan trailed his mouth over to lock on her pouting nipple. He bit the soft flesh roughly, leaving a mark before drawing the engorged nipple inside his mouth and sucking. When she moaned, “Declan…please…” he became ravenous, his gentle pleading hands going hard, hungry, jerking her against him, demanding a response instead of coaxing it from her.

Tori sobbed against his mouth as he moved back up her body, wedging between her legs and driving his cock against the notch between her thighs. He caught her clutching wrists in one hand and pinned them overhead, lifting upward to stare down at her. “Mine…you’re mine. Bound to me…” His gaze moved down to stare at her upthrust breasts still framed in black lace, her pale torso quivering with each breath she took.

His hands were pulling to free her from her pants when overhead, a wry, husky voice said, “Unless you want company, Declan, I suggest you stop. I think she is herself again.”

Declan’s head lifted, his eyes dark and hot, to stare down at Tori. Her eyes had darkened to sapphire in her passion and he watched as her tongue darted out to lick at her lips, as if she were holding onto his taste.

They turned as one to stare at the vampire who still knelt just a few feet away. His fangs had slid out and beneath the loose linen trousers he wore, his cock was clearly outlined. “Of course, a wolf is going to use sex to ground you,” he said, his voice sounding tight and strained. Beneath his open shirt, his muscled chest gleamed with a fine coat of sweat, and his eyes were glowing like heated gold as he stared down at them, his fangs erect and ready—hungry.

His cock throbbed and jerked, and he absently stroked his hand against his erection through his trousers, his lids drooping as he locked his eyes on Declan’s hands which were still on Tori’s waistband.

“Go away,” Declan growled, his fingers sliding past the barrier of silk that covered Tori’s cleft. He slid inside, shuddering when her swollen tissues clenched tightly around him.

“This isn’t what she needs right now,” Eli said, watching Declan’s hand inside Tori’s pants. Tori’s head rolled to the side and she met his eyes, her mind clouded with lust, confusion, and hunger.

“It’s what I need,” Declan growled pulling her pants to her knees and diving for the sweet cream that had already started to flow.

“And if her sire calls again?”

Tori cried out, her eyes opaque. Eli was watching hungrily as Declan’s tongue elongated, a handy little knack so many shifters had, watched as he slid that tongue inside her weeping passage. Declan’s eyes met Eli’s over the expanse of her body and he growled. The vibration shuddered up through his mouth and tongue into Tori’s body and she quaked. Declan tore his mouth away and replaced his tongue with his fingers, all the while watching Eli, as Eli watched them.

“God, her scent…” Eli rasped, his voice hot and smoky. He dropped to his hands and crawled closer to hover over her body as Declan’s fingers pumped in and out of her tight vagina.

“Mine,” Declan warned, his voice low and rough.

Eli reached out, quick as lightning, and Tori cried out in surprise when he flicked her clit, just quick enough to gather some of her cream before settling back, sliding his fingers inside his mouth and watching Declan. “You started it, old friend. And I am just a man.”

Tori was hardly aware of anything over the roaring in her ears. Just Declan’s mouth, then his hands. A second, cooler hand touched her briefly and she forced her heavy eyes to focus on the men above her. Declan’s head was lowering back to her dripping sheath, his eyes boring into Eli’s as he started to suckle on her pulsing clit.

Her head rolled on the carpet until she was staring at Eli again. The man—that beautiful, commanding man—was watching them both with near desperation, licking his forefinger, his fangs erect and gleaming. Gold eyes met hers, and she tried to look away, but those eyes held her.

Declan’s fingers worked deep inside her and she cried out when he pushed and pressed on the little spot that drove her mad, just as he bit into her clit delicately, catching the beaded flesh and pulling it tight.

She climaxed with a scream, cream flooding from her in a gush.

CHAPTER FIVE

When a low, rough voice spoke over her head a few minutes later, she forced her eyes to open. Staring up, she could see Declan and Eli facing off over her supine body. Their voices came in low tones, Declan’s a throbbing growl, Eli’s a raspy, almost hissing kind of purr that incited both fear and passion.

She felt almost full, and she wondered why, until she caught the faint hint of blood in her mouth. Somebody had fed her. The aftereffects of climax still shuddered through her, and she’d be sure to discuss sex play in front of others once she had Declan alone, but first she had to figure it out if she had enjoyed it, or if it was verboten.

But her head…it didn’t feel right.

She could almost feel something tugging at her, but every second she ignored it, the tugging grew weaker and weaker. A slimy, curdling sensation in her belly still lingered, as well, and for some reason, the man who had bitten her came to mind.

“What happened?”

They ignored her. Rising to her feet, she took a deep breath and shouted, “What happened?”

Hard, glinting green eyes landed on her, only to soften. Declan moved closer to her and brushed her cheek. “You’re all right,” he whispered. Something that resembled fear started to fade from his eyes and he pulled her against him. “Christ Jesus, thank you. You’re all right.”

“I don’t know if I am or not,” she said slowly, looking up at him. His hands smoothed down her arms and she flushed a little as he pulled his shirt off and buttoned her into it before stroking down her hair. “What happened?”

“Your sire tried to summon you,” Eli said, falling back and retreating to his chair. He dropped onto it, lounging like some giant feline creature, and studied her with those opaque gold eyes. “I believe if you had been in fighting form, you would have ignored it easily. But Declan is right—you haven’t fully fed. Until you do, you will remain weakened. And next time, if you are alone, he may succeed.

“You already possess a rather frightening strength of will,” he mused. “Seeing you at your full strength may be a rather frightening image.”

“If he summoned me, why am I still here? And why do I have blood all over me?” She could feel it drying on her face, in her nose.

“A Master can kill his creatures, the weaker ones easily, for disobeying him. He has a hold on you. It can be broken, but until it is, if he so desires, he can simply crush your brain and heart and wipe any traces of life from you,” Eli said quietly. “You have the strength of will to keep him from you, but not the strength to protect yourself. Yet.”

“He tried to kill me?”

“Yes.”

Tori was pretty damn glad Declan’s arms were firmly wrapped around her. She turned in his embrace, keeping his body aligned with her back so she could meet Eli’s eyes without straining her neck. “How did you feeding me stop it?”

“All you needed was a little strength. Well, actually a lot. You were resisting his call, but you couldn’t fight him. At full strength, you will fight him off easily.” Eli lifted his eyes to the ceiling, studying the painted swirls absently while his hand cupped his crotch. Tori’s eyes widened at the motion, and at the erection that still throbbed there.

“You already have a bond with Declan. I fed you to give you strength, and Declan called you, grounded you, and you were able to throw your sire’s grip off. Of course, I hadn’t realized exactly what method Declan would choose to call you,” Eli murmured, his voice becoming a low, silken purr. “You’re a rather tasty little bundle, Tori McAdams.”

She felt the warning growl rumbling up through Declan’s chest before it passed his lips. And she was all too aware of the hot sensation low in her belly. “You watched.”

“And tasted,” Eli replied with a seductive curl of his lips. “If Declan wasn’t one of only a few I call friend, I just might be tempted to keep you for myself. And he could go fuck himself.”

“And I have no say?” she asked, narrowing her eyes. She felt the hot wash of color flood her cheeks and her heart rate kicked up a bit in anger. Apparently Eli sensed it as well, because his eyes dropped to study the pulse in her throat.

“As weak as you are? Not much of one,” Eli responded slowly, still studying her pulse while he started to stroke his cock as it strained and pressed against his linen trousers. “He never completed his dominance over you, this vampire who changed you. I suspect he didn’t think you would survive the change. So many don’t, especially if they are left alone to fend for themselves. Since he didn’t expect you to survive it, he felt no need to establish himself as Master.

“It’s easy to master a newly turned vamp,” Eli finished, his odd gold eyes still fixated on her neck. Absently, almost as if he wasn’t that interested in his own arousal, he opened his pants and took his cock in hand. “So lost, so hungry. So malleable. It takes so little to establish the tiny psychic link it takes to be the Master.”

Tori couldn’t believe she was watching a man masturbate in front of her. She dragged her eyes away, but not before her mind caught a good long look at his cock, and committed it to memory; long, pale, with a fat pink head, his furry sac cupped in his other hand.

She turned around and faced Declan. “Such interesting friends you have,” she said, her voice shaking. She was humiliated to realize it wasn’t just embarrassment, but arousal.

Declan’s hands rubbed up and down her arms and she was startled to see that his nails had started to elongate, that his soft green eyes were glowing hard and bright. “He is being quite the ass tonight, love,” he said, his voice rough and tight. “I think he’s a bit upset that you’d not be pleased to stay with him. Most women are drawn to him, they can’t help it. Enough, Eli. I came here because we need help. You can jack off later.”

Eli’s head had fallen back and his eyes were closed. Tori could see his reflection in the dark pane of glass just over Declan’s shoulder. Her sharpened hearing caught a ragged sound of breathing coming from Eli—the first time she had actually noticed he breathed.

“What if I said I wouldn’t help unless I got to fuck her?”

Declan shifted. Tori jerked in startled surprise as he fell to the floor, writhing, his clothes splitting open and falling to shreds around his enlarging form. It was quicker this time, rougher, less controlled. Tori could feel and taste the violence that was pumping from him. She took a shaky breath, staring at the golden pelt in front of her as his clawed hands came up when he rose, and started to gently nudge her aside.

“Declan.”

He didn’t respond, a snarl falling from his lips as he forced the words out through his gaping mouth. “Elijah—”

“Declan!” she bellowed it out, and to her amazement, glass cracked and the house near trembled. His fanged snout whipped in her direction and he stared down at her. Eli laughed and she turned to glare at him. “If and when I ever decide to fuck you, it will be my choice. Yes or no, it is my choice, and it won’t be as payment.”

“So certain? I may end up owning you,” Eli pouted, his fist swallowing the head of his cock in short rapid strokes.

The wolf beside her tensed.

“Don’t, Declan,” she said quietly, reaching out and cautiously laying a hand on his muscled, fur covered arm. The fur was silken there, soft, and it curled around her fingers. “Don’t. He’s pushing your buttons, Declan. Something tells me it’s a perverse pleasure of his.”

“You’ve no idea how perverse my pleasures run,” Eli said from behind her, his voice laced with laughter. And then he sighed. “I believe I’ve taken the game too far. Nina!”

Tori heard faint footsteps from far away but she never took her attention from Declan. She moved closer, until she could slide her arms under his, pressing her cheek against the wall of his chest. He was taller in this form, wider and more thickly built. And oddly, Tori felt safer than she had ever felt in her life.

She nuzzled his chest with her cheek, feeling the soft, silky fur. With a turn of her neck, she pressed a kiss to a flat nipple visible through the thinner fur that covered his chest and belly and groin. “We came here for a reason, didn’t we?” she asked softly. “We’ve already been distracted once.”

His hands closed over her arms, the claws stroking the inner part of her arm, the outer curve of her breasts, while a rumbling sigh ruffled her hair. “Do not push, Eli,” he growled over her head, his glowing eyes pinning the vampire who had risen and finally covered his massive erection.

Roughly, Eli laughed. “I’m aware, Declan, of just how much she is yours. Too fucking bad,” he sighed just as the door swung open. “Will you be needing clothes, Declan?”

Tori glanced down, remembering with some surprise, that Declan’s were in pieces and his pelt was the only thing he wore. He simply growled, “No,” while he wrapped one arm around Tori, stroking her head with a hand nearly the size of a dinner plate.

He was still too angry, Tori realized. She decided, rather quickly, she wasn’t too upset by the idea of him being so possessive. Or that he was still in this rather alien form. Interesting didn’t quite begin to describe it, she figured. She wondered what it would be like to have him like this, that silken furred body between her thighs, his larger body nearly dwarfing her.

“Very well. Nina, go out to the yard and find me a volunteer. Tori needs to feed a little before we go out,” Eli said.

“Feed?” Tori repeated, incredulous.

“Out?” Declan demanded.

“You need to feed fully,” Eli said quietly, turning away from the girl who was already darting out the door. He paced closer and when he stopped Tori could have reached out and touched him. “In your youth, it is hard to feed fully without killing. We will take the edge, so to speak, off here. And then find someone deserving of what we can bring.”

“You want me to kill somebody?”

“I want you strong enough to resist your sire, the next time he summons you. And I want to see what will come of you,” Eli said, catching one fat curl in his hand and rubbing it with his thumb. Then he raised his eyes, dark and golden, to Declan’s. “I want to fuck her, as well. I cannot deny that, nor would you believe it.”

“But whether or not that happens, I will do all that I can to help you protect yours, my brother,” Eli said solemnly to the wolf.

“Excuse me, can we get back to me killing? I don’t want to kill.”

“Wait until you see who I intend for you to kill before you make that choice,” Eli advised. “I’ve had plans for him for several weeks now, but I held off, for some reason. He never made the mistake I warned him against, so I’ve been more lenient than I should have been.”

“I don’t want to kill—”Tori’s words were muffled when two clawed fingers covered her mouth. A shudder raced down her spine when Declan lowered his mouth to her ear and whispered roughly, “Wait until you see, Tori. Then, decide.”

“A good suggestion.” Eli turned as the door opened again, and revealed not one man, but two. “Why am I not surprised?” he mused as they entered, staring at Tori. “Not one snack, but two.”

Something inside Tori, something that was still far too human, revolted at the thought of treating a man as a snack. And while neither smelled as appetizing as Declan—and she doubted their blood would leave her belly filling like it was full of liquid gold like Eli’s blood had done—the scent of them, the pounding of their hearts drew her.

“She’s not fed on her own,” Eli drawled, flopping bonelessly into his chair. “Who will break her fast?”

The dark haired man with the Polynesian eyes and soft mouth reached her first, baring his throat by yanking his shirt open and tossing his dreadlocks aside. “I would be honored,” he whispered, his eyes raking over her pale face with an odd sort of yearning.

“I’d advise you not to expect more than feeding, James. The wolf guarding her back will tear out your throat before she has a chance to feed. And cold blood is revolting,” Eli said.

The heat that had sizzled in his eyes faded and he simply nodded, baring his throat to her, and Tori had the oddest image, of young, strong males, all lined up and baring their necks, while she went around sniffing them like vintage wines. She stifled the giggle, which was part hysteria, as she stepped closer. Casting Declan a nervous look, she trailed a hesitant hand down the throbbing vein in the man’s arched neck.

Then her hand fell away.

“I can’t,” she whispered weakly. Near tears, she turned her head away and said louder, “I can’t.”

Declan wrapped his arms tighter and forced her closer to the man who still stood, patiently waiting, with his neck arched. Underneath his golden skin, the vein pulsed and throbbed and beckoned, and Tori was half mad with hunger.

“I can’t.”

“Then you will die,” a voice said softly.

Lifting her eyes, she stared into Eli’s, so close to hers. He had gotten out of his chair and approached them while she was being squeamish. “He’s a human being, a person. I can’t treat him like food.”

“He is offering,” he said urgently. “It isn’t wicked, or evil. It’s just necessary. He is offering, and that is a fine gift. And I warn you, if you do not feed, completely, and fully, and soon, your sire will summon you, and you will surrender. Either that, or he will kill you. And I fear that death would be a sweet release compared to what he would do.”

“Feed, Torrance McAdams.”

That low, ancient, wise voice was starting to whisper in her head again. Tori whimpered against it, against the compelling urge to bite through the lovely golden skin, and feed. She fought against the urge, the hunger. “Only a fool refuses a gift offered freely. Take what is being given.”

“The hunger can drive a vampire insane,” Declan whispered. His hands—smooth and human—came around her and his voice was his own—soft, low, crooning music in her ear that sounded of Ireland, that made her think of green valleys and staggering rock walls and tumbled circles of stone. He had shifted back to his human form and his naked heat was pressed against her. “It will drive you mad, unless your sire manages to bring you to him first. If it drives you mad, you will fall upon the first person you see like a ravening beast, be it man, woman or child, and you will feed until that fire in your belly is extinguished.

“Will you risk that?” he asked against her ear, holding her tightly when she started to struggle.

She had to get away from that lovely source of blood. She had to.

“Do you hear, girl?” Declan snarled, whirling her around to face him.

“It will drive you insane and you will go feral, dying slowly inside from the guilt, while you prey night after night after night on innocents, killing them. Will you control this? Or let it control you?”

His face was livid and his eyes were full of rage and helplessness. “Ferals die quickly, Torrance. We cannot allow them to roam the streets. Will you be one of those we have to hunt? Do you know what that will do to me?”

The firelight lit his face, half in shadow, the other half painted a soft gold, his eyes stark and desperate, his hands digging into her arms tightly. He shook her slightly and she broke. Jerking away form him, she grabbed James and dove for his neck.

Instinct took over and her fangs burst from their sheaths and she struck, like a snake on a rabbit, latching on to the man’s neck, her fangs sliding through the golden, warm skin while her mouth latched on, suckling and swallowing. Distantly, she was aware of a hand on her head, of the low, humming moan that vibrated through James’ chest and up his throat. She was distantly aware of the erection that was pressed against her belly, distantly aware that the man who fed her was finding pleasure in this.

She was itching.

Deep inside.

And aching. Her hand fell back and she grabbed Declan’s hips while she swallowed more, feeling the hot blood fill her belly, feeling the glorious burst of strength. With a jerk, she pulled Declan forward until his hips cupped her bottom and she could pump her ass against him. Her nipples burned and her breasts ached. Her womb felt empty.

She wanted to fuck.

Badly.

Badly enough to do it right in front of everybody while she fed. Declan’s scent flooded her mind and she whimpered with need as a picture filled her mind’s eye, her feeding like this, while he shuttled his cock in and out of her bottom, while she rode the cock that was pressed against her belly.

“…enough… “

“…let go…”

“Tori!”

She was pulled away rather roughly and Declan held her pinned against his chest, his cock hot as a brand against her blue jean covered rear. Eli had caught James up in his arms, pulling him further back as the man lifted his hand toward her.

“Enough,” Eli said softly, taking his man to the couch.

“I want to finish it with her,” James said mournfully, staring at her with eyes that were still hot, but heavy with fatigue and blood loss.

“Finish it?” Tori whispered in horror as her sanity started to return. “Finish it?”

“He means he wants to have sex,” Declan whispered soothingly, stroking her head with his hand. “Sex, not death. This is why he does it. A vampire exudes a sexual call while he feeds, it’s like an aphrodisiac and a drug combined.”

“Finish,” James said petulantly, trying to shrug off Eli’s restraining hands.

A low whisper of something slithered through the air, and the hair on Tori’s arms stood up. Power. Magic. Something. It slithered through the air while Eli caught James’ chin in his hand and said, “Enough.” His voice was as silent as a whisper, but seemed to boom through the room.

“Enough,” he repeated, as James’ eyes started to clear and soften, while his lids drifted closed. “Sleep.”

And then he rose, eyeing Tori appraisingly. “They aren’t accustomed to feeding without sex, you see,” he said softly, lifting his shoulders in a shrug. “Nina let them know you were newly changed. The new ones tend to be brutal, and rough, and unsure how to make it more enjoyable. This should have not been a pleasant task for him. No sex, a new vamp cutting her teeth, so to speak, on him. Yet he craves more.

“I wonder how you knew to make it like that,” Eli mused, eyeing Declan and Tori. Then he turned his eyes to the other man, a slender towering blond who probably stood taller than Tori by a good two feet. “Are you ready, Caleb?”

The hot pulse of strength seemed to fill her and Tori was almost painfully aware of how much more vivid things had become. Caleb had dropped to his knees to offer his neck and it put him on level with her breasts, forcing her to bend over a little to get to his neck.

It hadn’t been quite so intense, and she had pulled away on her own, squelching the urge to turn and wrap her legs around Declan’s hips and demand sex right there.

But she wasn’t sure how much longer she could suppress it.

* * * * *

He was covered now, at least.

He had a low slung pair of jeans and a cotton shirt that he had yet to button, his sculpted chest and belly catching her eye every time he moved. His bare feet padded over the forest floor in silence—next to her—his hand linked with hers as they followed Eli.

They were walking now.

Eli had ushered them into a car after assisting Caleb, almost lovingly, like a parent, to lie down. Tori had heard his hushed orders to Nina to see them fed, to see that they drank, and that they rested. She had forced herself to approach them, even though she was still embarrassed, so uncomfortable with what she had done. But she had looked Caleb in the eye, James was still sleeping. “Thank you,” she said stiffly before turning and stalking away, her arms crossed over her pleasantly full tummy.

Shocking though, as they walked through a scraggly stand of trees, her belly was already seeming to empty.

“It’s because you haven’t gorged.”

She slid Eli a sidelong glance and lifted an eyebrow. He said, “You have to feed heavily at first. You’re developing your strength and building reserves. In time, you can learn to go a week or more between feedings. But you must first fully sate that hunger.”

His eyes flicked to the hand she had pressed against her belly, and then to the fangs that had yet to retract. “I know the signs of hunger, as I suffer them myself. And I know confusion and frustration when I see them,” he said, his voice soft with sympathy.

“I imagine, once you see what I have to show you, this feeding will be easier. After this, we can simply let you feed from a number of my people, but—”

Tori froze as a weak, pitiful whimper sounded through the dark trees, so far away, but so very clear.

Eli sighed, his handsome face grim, as he slid his eyes in the direction of the cry. “I hate the suffering of innocents. But the monsters who cause it…” His eyes started to glow and his fangs slid out, an unworldly power sliding over him.

Behind her, Declan paced alongside their back trail, his bare feet soundless on the forest floor. “This is a just thing you will do, Tori,” he murmured, his hands flexing and clenching, while his eyes gleamed with fury. “Do you smell her fear? Her blood? Tis a bad one you’ve found for us, Eli.”

“What’s going on?” Tori asked.

But then that fading whimper was replaced by a scream. Next to her, Eli said coldly, “Run. And find her.”

CHAPTER SIX

Tori ran.

The scent of blood and fear filled the air, but it brought no pleasure. Her belly roiled and rolled and clenched as she grew closer.

She ran.

And she found her.

A slim girl who would have been lovely except her face was marked with bruises and stained with blood as she crawled across the yard in a shredded T-shirt. One man stood in the door laughing, while the other stalked her, kicking at her side, and laughing when she cried out.

Eli laughed with pleasure and cried out, “Two for one,” but Tori barely heard it, much less made sense of it.

Instinct took her over yet again, and she lunged, not for the man who had frozen in mid-kick. But instinctively for the man who stood laughing in the door. A man who shared the girl’s soft brown eyes. A man who had her scent, the scent of her body and her blood, all over him.

He barely seemed to see her until she was sitting atop him and his struggles felt like those of a freshly hatched chick, weak and useless and pitiful. His blood filled her mouth in a hot wash of pleasure and she held his struggling body as he bucked and strained.

There was no pleasure for him.

It hurt him, and frightened him, and this gave her pleasure. His body reeked with the smells of blood, fear, and sperm. He’d raped that girl, that girl who looked like him. And passed her off to another man to do the same. Both had beaten her.

The rage inside her grew and she clutched his body harder, her hands shattering the fragile feeling bones in his arms as he continued to struggle.

She knew there were noises in the background, a scream, a low soothing murmur, the sound of a body being taken down, and the sound of one being lifted gently. She filtered all this information and filed it away, while she savored the weakening struggles and the salty taste of blood on her tongue.

It seemed to last forever, and no time at all.

She knew instinctively when his life faded away, even without the telltale slowing of his heart. She pulled away from his body and settled back on her heels, her head spinning, her senses heightened to near painful. Her breath sawed in out of her lungs and Tori stifled another hysterical giggle, as she thought of the B horror movies that showed the heroine, standing in a corner, her tits half hanging out of her bra, wearing that bra, panties and nothing else while she breathed raggedly, her breaths so loud it brought the killer to her.

Only Tori was the killer.

She dropped heavy lidded eyes to stare at the lifeless man before her, feelingly sated and satisfied. He had been the monster, not she. She had taken pieces of his mind, unable to block the images that had filled his mind, old memories, favorite songs, the porno flick he had watched the night before.

The money he had taken from the bastard who wanted to fuck his sister.

He had taken the money and stashed it, planning to buy coke with it. He had planned to use blood money to get high while his sister was raped. He hadn’t planned to actually rape her, but when she walked out of her room in just a T- shirt, he figured the slut was just as good as any other, blood or no.

She rose, the buzzing in her ears and the swirling sensation in her head making her feel drunk.

Declan was nowhere to be seen, but she could hear him, soft shushing noises while he calmed the distraught teen. Running water, a murmured apology before the girl gasped. Cleaning her wounds, Tori imagined, while she searched the yard.

Eli had the other man, the one who had been beating the girl when they arrived. He dropped his limp body to the ground when he felt Tori’s eyes on him. Her eyes landed on the feebly moving man, a question forming in her mind. But her thought processes felt so damned slow, Tori felt like she was trying to see her way through mud, putting together a question in her fogged mind.

Eli smiled, a tiny trickle of blood at the corner of his mouth, but otherwise he looked as if he had just risen from the chair he had been sprawling in earlier. His golden eyes were glowing, though, with an unholy, feral light. “I do not need to drain a person any more. It is something that comes in time.”

“He doesn’t deserve to live,” she whispered, her tongue feeling thick and awkward. Pressing a palm to her brow, she asked, “Why do I feel so strange?”

“You’ve been starving, and suddenly, you gorged yourself,” Eli said with a shrug, stepping over the inert body at his feet as if it were a pile of dog shit. “Your body has started to accustom itself and now it is suddenly full and satisfied. You are satisfied, are you not?”

Her lids drooped and she pressed a hand to her belly, which felt warm and golden. “Yes,” she drawled. “Hmm, yes.”

She was aware that Declan had moved through the house and left the girl resting on the couch. How he had gotten her to sleep, Tori couldn’t fathom, but she could hear the soft gentle snores coming from the couch.

“She sleeps,” Declan said needlessly, moving to stare out at the yard. He turned his eyes to study Tori. “You have his blood on your mouth, Tori.”

She pressed the back of her hand against her mouth and studied the red smear it came away with. Now that her belly was full, and that man was dead, the blood smelled and looked distasteful and she wiped it away with her shirt sleeve. She cast the corpse an evil look and echoed Declan’s words.

“Some people deserve death.”

Eli took the girl.

One moment he was by her side, lifting her up and then Tori felt a cool rush of air whip by her and he was gone.

“What—”

“He’ll be finding someone to look after her,” Declan promised. “And since he left so suddenly, we will have to do some housecleaning.”

“Housecleaning?”

He flicked a glance to the corpse in the yard and then the man who lay unconscious a little further out. “Can’t go leaving them to lie about in the sun all day, now can we? Pesky cops and their infernal questions,” he said with a grin.

“And who better than to erase the evidence?” she mocked lightly, looping an arm with his.

“Not erasing. Rearranging,” he corrected. “Too clean and it’ll look even more suspicious. Eli has hit this type before. The man you took had a record a mile long, I imagine. And I smell drugs. Cocaine, methadone, marijuana. I figure a little sleight of hand, so to speak, and this will look like a drug deal gone wrong.”

When she asked exactly what kind of sleighting he was talking of, he flashed a toothy smile. “Darlin’ girl, I’m not certain you’ve the stomach for what I am planning.”

“I just killed a man in cold blood,” she reminded him.

“That was heat, sweet. Not cold. Fueled by anger and hunger. Not necessity or planning.” And with that, he left her standing on the porch. She watched as he used a kerchief from his back pocket to wrap around his hand as he rummaged through the dead man’s clothes. Moments later, he pulled out a butterfly knife with a wicked six inch blade.

Tori was fast. But not fast enough.

By the time she had leaped across the porch and reached Declan’s side, he had slashed the neat puncture wounds on the wounded man’s neck and widened it. Drastically.

She knew what a killing neck wound looked like. She had seen several, well, three to be exact.

Apparently Declan knew as well.

Because he had recreated one, taken two neat puncture holes and ripped them wide, ripping the throat open until blood gushed out. It looked like Eli hadn’t taken much blood at all, because it splattered out in a fountain of deep red, forceful and pulsing. It would have been a weaker flow if he had been low on blood.

Tori instinctively stepped away as the blood flowed, eyeing Declan apprehensively.

Declan hurled the knife away, watching where it fell with satisfaction before he stood and faced Tori. “He paid her brother money so he could rape her. Rape, Tori. They both knew it was rape.” He surveyed the bloody mess at his feet before he leaped out of it, crossing a distance of ten feet with one bound, leaving the blood pattern undisturbed. “And neither of them cared. He was a monster, and we both know it. If he had lived, he would have walked away from this. Well, after spending a few days in the hospital and getting some O positive. Would you have wanted it that way?”

Reluctantly, she shook her head. “You’re a cop, Declan,” she said, her voice rusty with shock.

“Second. A cop second. I’m a Hunter first. That’s one of the things we’ll be talking about. Eli and I are both Hunters. Hunters of those who can prey on the weak, human or…not. Being a cop lets me do things the legal way, but they don’t always stay put away, Tori,” he said. “Their deaths, while definitely vigilantism, are final.”

“So you’re judge, jury and executioner?” she asked, her voice wobbling a little. This wasn’t the first time, it seemed. He had done it before.

“We do not make mistakes, not the way a jury of humans could. I’ve never killed a man who didn’t deserve the death I dealt him. And I’d wager Eli hasn’t taken an innocent life, well, not once he passed the madness of the first days after he had changed. We know the smell of evil, and even if we didn’t, such a scene as this cannot be interpreted wrong. Eli doesn’t pick his kills carelessly, and neither do I.”

He flexed his hands and Tori saw, for the first time, his long, graceful hands weren’t quite…normal. His nails had started to darken and lengthen, and as she watched, the muscles in his arms and torso started to ripple before smoothing out when he gritted his teeth and closed his eyes. “I do not like death, Tori. I do not enjoy killing, regardless of the circumstances. But I do like knowing that these men will never harm another creature.”

Tori swallowed, her throat tight and her belly hot. Tears had started to trickle down her face, but she recalled the young girl she had seen. “So do I,” she said softly, dashing one tear away. She scrubbed her face with her hands, unknowingly smearing the blood, before she met Declan’s eyes and asked, “What do you do now?”

He smiled and traced one hand down her cheek gently. “Go back to Eli’s. You need to rest, and you need to think. I will take care of this,” he told her.

She caught his hand and tugged until he turned his face back to her. “Take care of it how?”

“His body needs to be disposed of. I’ll hide the drugs, make it look like this one,” he indicated the man whose blood had finally stopped flowing from his neck, “had taken the drugs and it was all a fight over that. Eli will take care of the girl. Rescuing the innocent is his favorite pastime. All neat and tidy.”

“Tidy,” she whispered faintly.

“Go back to Eli’s.”

She did.

The buzzing had returned and Tori wondered dimly if vampires could go into shock. She wandered down the midnight dark trail, following the signs of their earlier passage easily and unconsciously, her mind in turmoil.

She stood on the porch later, staring into the night, watching as the horizon started to lighten. One of Eli’s people had panicked and attempted to drag her inside and Eli had been forced to leave the safety of his home. They had remained outside as long as Eli had been able, trying to coax Tori inside before Eli had given up and led Nina in, promising Tori would be fine.

Fine, well, that may have been pushing it. She didn’t feel fine.

“You will be fine,” that old familiar voice whispered softly.

Tori had an image of an old woman settling down in her rocker for a long chat and she suppressed the urge to scream. This? Now? “Who are you?” she thought wearily, trying to direct her thoughts down the path where she sensed the old woman.

“A friend.Just somebody trying to help.”

“Why didn’t you step in before this happened?”

“I didn’t know it was going to happen. Only after Manuel came for you did I know about you. He is the one I follow. His death is the one I need for peace.”

“Manuel. He is the one who bit me.”

“He is.” A shuddering sigh filled Tori’s mind and she felt the enormous weariness that rode the old woman. “Five centuries I have waited, Tori McAdams, five long centuries, waiting for one who would not only survive the change, but survive with her humanity intact.”

“You know what I am, knew what I would be? That’s why you came to me, isn’t it?”

“Yes. You will find him. You will kill him. And I will finally be at peace.”

“Who is he?”

A sad, mournful cry came floating along the path and the old woman said sorrowfully, “My son.”

And then her presence was gone.

Tori stood in the predawn, struggling to find peace. She didn’t know how to handle the emotions inside her. She had killed. She had witnessed cold-blooded murder.

But she didn’t feel wrong. She didn’t feel guilty. And she was worried it was because she was becoming a monster. Her emotions hadn’t seemed to change, but she was certain that killing a man, and watching while an injured man was killed, should have been wrong, should have been evil.

But it felt right.

She forced her mind to think back to how she would have felt if she had stumbled upon the scene before she was changed. And she finally came to the conclusion that she would have killed that man just the same. With a gun, most likely, but he would be just as dead.

And the other man deserved it as well.

Men like that weren’t really men, but animals, sick animals. And Tori didn’t believe in trying to rehabilitate a sick animal. Jail wouldn’t have been good enough, even if they had been able to force such an ending. A jail term would have been too short, and too kind.

She grew aware of the lateness, or rather the earliness, of the day when her skin started to itch. Glancing down, she saw her hands were lobster red, blisters forming, and a look at the sky told her it was probably close to seven. She retreated to the soothing, cooling darkness of Eli’s home, and the wide, confused eyes of his people.

“The Master requested I care for you when you came in,” Nina said hesitantly, staring with confusion at Tori’s nearly burned face and the blisters that were starting to form. “Mistress—”

“Don’t call me that,” she said wearily, fatigue making her limbs heavy.

“Mis—ah, well. How can you take the sunlight?”

She grew aware of Declan’s presence slowly, first his scent, which was ripe and hot with anger, and then his voice, which was harsh. “She’s a hybrid, Nina. She can tolerate sunlight, but damn it, Tori, did you have to bathe in it?” he snapped, appearing in front of her, the door behind him wide open and letting in more of the sun that was becoming far too painful for her sensitized nerves.

“She’s not spoken, Mr. Reilly. Not a word since she returned and the Master said to leave her be. But how can she tolerate sun? Isn’t she newly turned?”

“Nina, I don’t have time for questions,” Declan said harshly, gently lifting Tori up, taking care not to touch her face or blistered hands and forearms. “Go run a cool bath, and find me something to treat sunburn.”

Tori giggled. “Sunburn?”

“Have ya seen yourself?” he snapped, carrying her upstairs and depositing her in the bathroom where Nina was indeed running a bath in the darkened room. Tori could see herself, even in the nearly dark room. Her face was red and blistered. Studying her hands, she saw more blisters. And on her fingers, some of those blisters were turning black. “Silly little fool, what were you thinking?”

She made an attempt to tug her clothes off, craving the soothing, cool water, but her vision grayed, and then darkened.

And she was out, unable to resist the heavy pull of sleep with the sun riding higher and higher in the sky.

In sleep, she bore more resemblance to the vampires Declan knew. Her heart slowed and her breathing was minimal. But the sleep and the nourishment she had finally taken were working magic and her reddened, blistered skin was clearing and smoothing with every slow beat of her heart.

He shouldn’t have used the methods he had used. Tori hadn’t been ready and he knew damn good and well it had been shock and confusion that had caused this. He should have had Eli deal with cleaning up the mess and brought Tori back here.

Hindsight, after all, was twenty-twenty. Grimly, he hoped her hunger had been sated. He wasn’t certain he could get her to feed again tonight. He was also certain that tonight she was going to be full of questions. And he doubted he had the right answers.

It was nearing twilight when he heard Eli wake.

A great shuddering sigh left the old vampire as he climbed from his bed, his current companion still snuggling there, snoring softly. Declan could hear the woman’s soft, sighing breaths, and even her heartbeat, beyond the sounds of rushing water as Eli showered.

Later, the vampire appeared in the room, padding on silent feet to stare down at Tori. “Nina and I tried to bring her in before the sun rose, Declan. But she wouldn’t leave. I was worried that she might remain out there but I couldn’t stay any longer. And I did not think she would let herself burn to ashes.” He traced a gentle finger over a nearly healed blister and said with a sigh, “I should have forced her to come in.”

“She has had a little too much forced on her of late,” Declan said, shaking his head. “Do not blame yourself. I should have come back with her, but I went about cleaning up as usual and didn’t think ahead to what it would do to Tori.”

“She is still human in her heart,” Eli said softly. “I do not know if that is a weakness, or a strength.”

“Neither do I,” he echoed. “I do not look forward to the coming night. She will have questions, and she may be angry.”

“Ah, I wouldn’t count on it,” Eli said, stifling a smile. “And…well, her mind was troubled when I first went to her outside. I sensed none of that turbulence when she crossed my threshold, only weariness. And then pain. I couldn’t understand that, but now I do. I would dare say that she was working this out in her mind. It would have been less painful if she hadn’t chosen the early morning sun as her confidant, but I believe she is at peace with last night.”

“Maybe with her feeding, but not with me killing a man who was unconscious,” Declan muttered.

“Hmm. Well, that aside, I recall when I was younger, after gorging, there was only one thing I wanted.”

“More blood?” Declan drawled sardonically. “It may be mine she’s after.”

“Well, she will be after you. But it is fucking she will want, not feeding. She is starting to wake. A word of advice—she is going to want to dominate. If you were human, you’d have no choice. But to let a vampire near mad with the urge to fuck dominate isn’t going to set a good precedent for your relationship. If I were you, and I rather wish I were, I’d do the dominating tonight.”

“I don’t relish the master and servant role, Eli,” Declan said, watching Tori’s still face. How could the vampire sense she was waking?

“It isn’t a role you need to play, and I am not suggesting a new lifestyle. But do not let her take you, Declan. These first nights are integral for who she will become. No matter how human her heart is, she is vampire, and her ways will be that of a vampire. If she gets used to taking and taking and taking, it will not be easy to change that.”

Declan arched a blond brow at Eli and reminded him, “I am familiar with the vampire, Eli. You made certain of that, remember?”

“Then you should know I am right,” Eli replied, his voice aggravated. He shoved a hand through his hair and said quietly, “You are in love with her; I see it. But you will never be happy as anything other than her equal. She will be a Master, Declan. And the vampire Master cannot help but try to control everything around him. Can you tell me, old friend, that you would be happy under her control, for all your long years?”

Declan sighed, pressing his thumb and forefinger to his eye sockets, trying to relieve the headache that was building. “I’ve no wish to dominate Tori. I do love her, and she will not be happy under anybody’s control, no more than you or I would be.”

“For pity’s sake, Declan, I’m not suggesting you bring out the whips and handcuffs. But do not tell me you are sexually passive, or submissive. Do not tell me you haven’t taken control while you’re fucking her. I will not believe it, I know you too well.”

Declan’s lids drooped and his mouth curled in an unconscious smile as he recalled the previous day. No whips or handcuffs, certainly. Not that the handcuffs didn’t hold some appeal.

“There’s a difference between dominating her for this, and dominating her. You aren’t trying to control her, Declan. I doubt you could. Even her sire is having difficulty with that.”

“Will her sire try for her tonight?”

“I imagine so,” Eli said broodingly. “All the more reason for you to climb in that bed and take her. Your bond with her is proving to be as strong as the bond between sire and offspring. I would suggest you take advantage of that. She wakes.”

Eli whirled, his open shirt and hair swirling around him as he left the room in swift silence. Declan remained seated a few moments longer, and then he shot to his feet, following Eli. He found him a floor down, with Nina caught up in his arms, intent on freeing the tiny redhead from her dress and shoving her hair aside.

“A minute, Eli?” he asked as the vampire started to slide her skirt up.

“Fuck, Declan, can you go away?” Eli muttered, glaring at him as he stroked the silky strands of hair from Nina’s neck. “I haven’t even had breakfast.”

Leaning against the wall, Declan said, “Is breakfast the only thing you want right now?” He slid his eyes up the stairs, following the scent and sound of Tori.

Eli’s eyes narrowed and he straightened. Smoothing Nina’s dress into place, he lifted her chin and kissed her softly before whispering in her ear. Nina left, not quite pouting, but very unhappy.

“What did you have in mind?” Eli asked, cocking his head and staring at Declan with narrowed eyes.

They parted a few minutes later and Declan returned to the room. Watching Tori’s still and silent face he settled back to wait, his mind running in circles.

If her sire tried to call, Tori had to be protected. Take advantage of it, Eli had suggested.

Aye, he’d take advantage, all right. Of her, of Eli, of every weapon he had in his arsenal, so long as it kept Tori safe.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Some five minutes later, Tori’s eyes started to move behind her eyelids. Her face grew more animated and her heart rate picked up. Several moments later she started to breathe steadily and finally her lids lifted and she stared at Declan, wide awake and alert.

“How do you feel?” he asked, slumping lower in his chair and staring at her reddened face. Only a few blisters remained and Declan imagined those would fade after she fed.

Pressing one finger to her flushed cheek she winced and answered, “Sore. And silly. I never even paid attention to the sun.”

“You’re lucky you didn’t kill yourself, Torrance. You can tolerate sunlight, yes, but that it was uncomfortable after a few moments tells me that you can not walk in it as you once did. At least not yet.”

“I figured that out.” She sat up, the sheets pooling in her lap. Declan’s eyes landed on her full breasts and rosy pink nipples and his mouth started to water, his jaws aching. “I needed to think.”

“And…?” he asked with only half a mind. The other half had fixated on her naked torso, and with some reluctant curiosity, on the conversation with Eli.

“They deserved it,” she said, lifting one smooth, pale shoulder. “Some people deserve death, you told me. I understand that, and they did deserve it.”

A soft knock sounded at the door and Declan’s eyes closed as he whispered a silent prayer of thanks. “Come in,” Tori called, drawing her knees to her chest and arranging the sheets to cover her body.

“We’ve brought some food,” Nina said softly, wheeling in a cart. “We will be leaving shortly and didn’t want you to go hungry. The Master said we should ask if you, ah, wanted food or…ah, hmm.” Her voice trailed off while she stared at Tori, obviously trying to understand this additional peculiarity, a vampire who could eat.

“If you wanted food or me,” a soft baritone said from the doorway.

Declan’s lids lifted minutely and he studied the tall man in the doorway. Well, man might not be accurate. A wolf. “Watch yourself, pup,” he said quietly, not straightening from his slouch as he watched the man cross the threshold.

“I only seek to please the lady, Inherent,” this new shifter responded, instantly dropping his eyes. Inherent. A respectful, proper title, a polite way of letting Declan know that the new wolf was aware of their differences, and that he was the weaker.

“Her pleasure is my concern,” Declan said. “But if she is hungry, then by all means.”

Tori’s eyes were wide, and Declan could see the slight bulge behind her upper lip as her fangs started to emerge. The wolf, a muscled brunette with the strong, sculpted physique of a weightlifter, asked quietly, “May I, lady?”

Tori’s eyes flitted to Declan and he shrugged. “You’re hungry, you may as well.”

The shifter didn’t so much as wait for her to open her mouth but crossed the floor and dropped to his knees beside the bed, facing away. His face was just a few feet from Declan’s but the man kept his eyes averted. “What’s your name, pup?” Declan asked.

“Jonathan,” he responded as Tori shifted behind him, drawing the sheet and wrapping it around her before sliding to the edge of the bed. With him kneeling, she was right at his shoulder level. Licking her lips, she trailed her fingers over his neck.

Jonathan shuddered, his eyes—a soft warm brown—were glowing gold and his cock was pressing firmly against his low-slung jeans. Tori flushed and Declan knew just when she had caught scent of the wolf’s arousal and he smiled when her own scent started to flare. Feeding was nearly a sexual thing for many vampires, and Tori wasn’t going to be much different on that.

He was half aware of Nina setting up the food on the table—he smelled bacon, eggs, steak, potatoes—and though his belly growled insistently, he ignored it. He didn’t bother telling the girl not to mess with it, because he’d need to eat later.

Tori threw her hair over her shoulder with one hand, the other gripping Jonathan’s arm and curling her fingers into his bicep. Declan watched as she struck, Jonathan flinched just slightly before his eyes closed in pleasure, his heart pounding heavily in his chest.

Declan could smell the blood in the air, mingled with the scent of hot, hungry bodies. Nina stood just behind him, panting slightly, her body becoming damp and ready as she watched. If it hadn’t been Tori sitting there feeding, he might have been tempted to pull the little redhead onto his lap and ease both their aches.

“Enough, Tori,” Declan said a few moments later when she showed no signs of pulling away.

Her eyes rolled up and met his over Jonathan’s body and he saw a slight pout forming there. Lifting a brow, he reminded, “He’s still able to bleed to death, Tori, werewolf or not.”

“I wouldn’t mind…” Jonathan whispered, sulking when Tori pulled away, a tiny bit of blood on her lips. She daintily licked away the few drops that beaded from the puncture wounds before settling back with a pleased sigh.

Jonathan’s hands flexed and Declan was reminded the full moon was only a few days away. Power strummed through the werewolf’s body, augmented by lust. “She’s done with you, pup,” Declan warned when Jonathan half turned to stare at Tori. “If you’ve a need, go fuck Nina. Eli wouldn’t care and she’s needing it anyway.”

“But do not dare to touch my lady,” he said, slowly sliding up in his chair and rising to his feet in a lazy, controlled movement, his eyes glowing hot and green as he stared at the werewolf.

“I meant no disrespect, Inherent,” Jonathan murmured, rising to his feet and backing away quickly, his eyes downcast.

“Get out, pup, now,” Declan said with a snarl. Then he turned and dismissed them both. Before either of them had even cleared the door, Declan had Tori’s arms in his hands and he was lifting her to her feet, stripping the sheet away and staring at her naked body with possessive eyes. Her face was glowing with life and vitality, her eyes warm and electric blue, gleaming in the dimness of the room. Her breasts rose full and round, topped with nipples that hardened as he watched, darkening and drawing tight. Trailing his eyes down her length, he took one nipple between finger and thumb, pinching lightly, as he continued to admire. Her long torso curved in slightly before flaring into a pair of full, rounded hips, her cleft covered by a tiny patch of dark curls.

“Now that your hunger is eased, let’s take care of mine,” he said roughly, freeing his cock from his jeans with one hand while the other wrapped itself in Tori’s hair. “I want you to take my cock in your mouth again, and down your throat. Later, I’m going to put it in that tight, hot little ass of yours.”

She fell to her knees under his urging hand, staring up at him with wide, somewhat apprehensive eyes. Then she focused on the throbbing shaft in front of her, ruddy and pulsing with every beat of his heart. Leaning forward she took in the flared head, letting it slide across her tongue and down her throat, relaxing her throat muscles and taking more of his length inside her.

Her nipples felt hard and pinched and she absently reached up to stroke them, staring up into Declan’s eyes over the length of his body. His harsh voice cut her off, “No. When you get touched tonight, I’ll be doing the touching.” She paused in the act of taking his length back down her throat, pulling off slowly, the corners of her mouth lifting in a tiny smile as she stared up at him.

One brow lifted and a slight smirk settled on her face as she slid her hand down her torso and plunged two fingers into her wet passage. Her lids fluttered before she opened them wide, staring up at Declan, his large cock throbbing just in front of her mouth, while she started to slide her fingers in and out.

Declan dropped to his heels in front of her, staring at her soberly, never once glancing at her busy little hand. “I suppose, in the name of fairness, I should tell you one more time. Stop it. The only thing you can touch tonight is me.”

With her free hand, she reached up and caught his nape, trying to pull his mouth within range as her breathing picked up. He acquiesced, for a brief moment, plunging his tongue deep into her mouth, withdrawing to nibble on her lip before he snatched her up and tossed her on the four-poster bed.

Tori laughed and resumed masturbating, her fingers stroking her throbbing clit before delving back inside. She felt powerful and greedy, wanted to control everything in her and around her. Even him. She opened her eyes, searching him out, following the rustling noises beyond the bed. When Declan appeared back at the bedside, she stared up at him tauntingly, circling her fingers around her clit rapidly as orgasm rushed closer. It was fun, much more fun, to give herself an orgasm while somebody else watched and wanted.

She was still panting, her heart rate slowing to normal, when Declan flipped her onto her belly, grabbed her hands, and snapped them into the handcuffs. “Hey!” she yelped, glaring over her shoulder at him. He smiled angelically and shrugged before lifting her back up and depositing her on her knees.

“I did try to warn you, darlin’ girl,” he said, spearing his hands through her hair and guiding her resistant mouth back to his cock. “And by the way, those are reinforced cuffs, sweet. Made special, at my request, by a friend. Seeing as how I never know when I’ll run into a non-human on the job.”

The flexing of her shoulders stopped as she realized—new strength or not—those cuffs weren’t breaking. Glaring up at him, a sulk turning her mouth down, she said, “Take ‘em off, Declan.” She resisted the pull of his hand, even though that lovely cock bobbed and pulsed in front of her, beckoning her.

“You’ll have to earn it now,” he told her with a shrug. Wrapping one hand around his shaft, he started to stroke, watching her with heavy-lidded eyes. His tanned fist swallowed the head of his shaft, once, twice, and he hummed under his breath and then sighed dramatically. “I’d rather it be your mouth. Hot and softer than silk.” He pumped again and used his other hand to cup his sac as he watched her with hot, gleaming eyes.

She leaned forward, intent on nipping him, but he caught her head with his free hand, wrapping his hand in her hair and holding her still. “Take it in your mouth, but be nice about it,” he warned. “Otherwise, I’ll paddle your ass.”

“You’re being a jackass,” she muttered but the heat in her belly was spreading and overriding her indignation. She caught his long, thick length in her mouth, flexing against the cuffs on her wrists before she started to slide her head up and down. His hands caught in her hair and he ordered in a low rasp, “Deeper, all the way back.” He started to thrust in, through her mouth, down her throat. “All of it.”

His voice was breathy and rough and his hands holding her felt like iron. But Tori relaxed her throat as much as she could, taking his length in, inch after inch, until her airway was blocked. She suckled and caressed his steely, silken flesh, relishing the hot salty taste of him, the life that flowed just under his smooth skin.

With his hands buried in her hair, he guided her, switching from short shallow thrusts, to deep hard ones that bruised her throat. He cupped his balls with one hand, grunting with pleasure as Tori slowed her pace, swirling her tongue across the head of his cock before sliding down his length again, her mouth stretched tight around his width as his long shaft pushed down her throat.

She stared up at him through the veil of her lashes, his long powerful torso gleaming with a fine coat of sweat as he pumped his hips, moving his cock in and out of her mouth, his eyes closed, his face a mask of agonized pleasure. The muscles in his belly contracted and a rough groan rumbled out of his throat, his cock jerking roughly in the tight embrace of her mouth.

Tori shuddered when he started to come in thick, heavy pulses—his climax long and drawn out. Eyes watering, lungs burning, she swallowed the semen down and pulled back, lifting her damp eyes to stare up at him. Licking her lips, she whispered, “God, that was good.”

“I’ll say,” a familiar voice said from by the door.

She whirled and fell, ever so gracefully, onto her naked ass, staring at Eli.

“Get out,” she hissed from her side, drawing her knees up to cover her body, unaware that doing so exposed her wet, plump folds to Eli’s greedy gaze.

Eli shrugged, staring at Declan. “Did that feel as good as it looked?” he asked conversationally as he started to shed his clothes.

“Better,” Declan replied over Tori’s sputtering curses. He wrapped her in his arms and caught her muttered, “Son of bitch—” in his mouth, driving his tongue down her throat as he walked her backward until she fell onto the bed, her hands pinned beneath her.

He shifted, pinning her down with his weight across her torso before kissing his way to murmur in her ear, “I can smell it, how hot you’re getting, how much you want this. Do you think I didn’t notice it earlier? He’s already watched, and you both enjoyed it. Let’s enjoy a little more.”

Tori shrieked when she felt Eli’s hands spreading her thighs, but it fell to a weak, tortured moan when he opened her cleft with one swipe of his tongue before he sought out her clit and caught it between his teeth. One hand held her rump while the fingers of the other hand started to spear her depths.

Declan’s mouth closed over her nipple when she started to gasp. Behind him, Eli suckled on her clit in tandem with Declan’s movement on her breast, his fingers stroking her skillfully before starting to slide downward. When his thumb pressed against her anus, Tori bucked and whimpered.

“Been here, Declan?” Eli asked, lifting his head, his mouth and chin gleaming with her cream as he watched his thumb penetrate the tight ring of muscle.

Declan’s only answer was a faint grunt as he worked his way back up to kiss Tori’s open mouth. His cock was hard and aching and he was ready to bury it in her dripping vagina, in her tight ass, but he continued to play and pluck her nipples, glancing downward when Eli went back to lapping at her exposed folds.

Declan whispered against her hair, “You’re so damn tasty. I may have to pry him away; maybe I should have kept your cream all to myself.”

“Fat chance,” Eli muttered, lifting her hips more with his free hand, spreading more of her lubrication to ease the tight fit of his thumb in her bottom.

“Can I have her ass first? God, she’s tight. I don’t know if I’ve ever sodomized a hole that damned tight before.”

“Mine,” Declan growled, shooting Eli a narrowed glance.

Tori erupted with a cry when Eli drove his tongue deep inside her folds just as he slipped his thumb all the way inside her ass.

She gasped, shuddered and whimpered, hardly aware Declan had rolled her to her side and removed the cuffs. Her body was lifted, shifted, and she was straddling a man’s lap while her body and mind tried to reunite once more. When her lids lifted, she was staring into Eli’s angelic looking face, his cock probing at her entrance. It was bizarre, staring into that face that she had only just seen the first time a day ago, and feeling his cock, fatter than Declan’s, though not quite as long, work inside her.

She quivered when she felt Declan come up behind her, spreading lubricant on her anus, coating his fingers with it and sliding them inside. Then the flared head started to bump against her hole and she froze. Eli’s hand slid between them and he started to circle her clit lazily as he took her mouth. Their fangs had emerged and Tori felt him nip her lip and suckle at the beaded drop of blood before he pushed his tongue inside her mouth.

In her head. She could feel him inside her head, whispering and crooning to her just as Declan was doing in her ear. Relax, Tori. Declan would never do anything to cause you true pain, he promised, his mind voice a silken purring echo of his normal voice.

As he slid his tongue between her fangs, to tangle with hers, Declan’s hands went to her bottom and pulled her cheeks apart, easing his slow penetration a bit. “We need this,” he murmured against her ear. “All of us. Take it inside you, Tori. You’ve done so before.”

Her head fell back as Eli released her mouth to nuzzle her neck. She cried out in shock when she felt his fangs break her skin and slide home. Declan’s cock slid in to his balls at the same time and she convulsed, straining between them, and screaming at the mind shattering pleasure. Her clit was caught between thumb and forefinger, pinched and plucked at before somebody started to circle it with fast steady strokes. Her orgasm ripped through her like a volcano, hot molten lava pouring from her womb as she fell back to rest against Declan’s body, her muscles clenching and clutching at the invading cocks. She was stretched too tight, penetrated far too deeply, hanging just between pleasure and pain while they thrust inside in tandem.

Eli’s body was shuddering and he fed at her throat like a man starved, while Declan and he plunged their cocks inside her body in unison. He wrenched his mouth away with a tortured moan, his eyes glowing hot and wild as he caught her mouth, smearing her own blood on her lips as he sought more of her taste.

A hand buried in her hair moments later, pulling her from the kiss and guiding her mouth to Eli’s neck. “Feed,” Declan whispered gutturally, pulling out and sinking back home inside her rump.

Unable to resist, she struck, hearing Eli’s ragged cry when she bit him, when her fangs pierced his skin as his cock pierced her pussy. None of them were truly aware of the lurking presence that had started to coalesce outside the windows of the house, though Declan and Eli had been expecting this. Her body and mind writhing under the pleasure, the call that had seized her the night before barely even touched her awareness, and had no effect.

But the malevolent force gathered and grew.

Tori lifted her mouth from Eli’s neck and stared down at him with a slumberous, heavy gaze as Declan pulled out of her body, his cock still hard, wet and gleaming from lubricant.

Eli remained inside her, using his hands to lift her weight up and down on his cock. Moments later, though, he pulled out and lifted her, standing beside the bed with her weight in his arms as Declan returned and lay down, reaching and pulling her body against him, cuddling her and stroking her gently, his eyes glowing and hot with adoration and need. She straddled him, grasping his cock and holding it steady while she slid home, his longer length slicing through her already sensitized tissues with a sensation that bordered on pain. She felt Eli’s hand on her back once she had slid home, and he urged her forward, positioning her knees and hips so that he had access to her wet, gleaming rosette—using more lubricant, coating her anus with it, and then his thick cock before he took her hips in his hand and started to work the smooth, round thickness of his penis inside.

Tori cried out, feeling stretched too tight, the burning sensation of that fat cock parting her swollen flesh too much. She whimpered and bucked against their restraining hands, Declan’s whispered endearments and pleas falling on deaf ears.

She felt something, dark and evil, swirling in her mind, trying to take hold. Instinctively, she threw it off and struck out, catching Declan’s neck and piercing his skin—his hot, sweet blood filling her mouth before sliding down her throat to her belly and leaving fire in its wake, to spread and creep through her body until every vein seemed to fill with the hot liquid gold.

The dim light danced over their damp, gleaming bodies as Declan pushed upward inside her tight, swollen pussy, while Eli braced his hands low on her spine and surged deep into the firm clasp of her ass, groaning under his breath.

Tori whimpered, unable to focus on anything beyond the pleasure and the hot liquid gold of Declan’s blood in her belly and veins. A warm, pulsing, magical sensation formed deep inside her chest as Declan whispered and crooned against her damp skin.

She shuddered as Eli spread the cheeks of her ass and drove home, burying his thick cock completely inside her ass, before pulling out and working it back in against the clinging, resistant pull of her muscles.

Declan groaned as she contracted around them, her hot, tight body clenching and gripping his cock with a velvet fist. He could feel how tightly stretched she was, could feel Eli’s movements picking up as her body started to open and relax and clamor for more. He felt it as her fangs slid from his flesh, her tongue laving over the neat holes, catching the tiny trickle of blood and swallowing it down. He reached up, and caught her face between his hands.

“Forever,” he rasped before he shuddered and bowed underneath her, fighting the urge to shift, and throw her to the floor and rut on her like an animal. His teeth lengthened and he caught her head, brushing her hair aside before he sought and found and pierced the fading marks left from when Eli had fed.

The moment her blood flooded his mouth, she climaxed with a scream, muffled against his chest, while Eli pounded into her ass and Declan rolled his hips against hers, driving his cock in to the balls, lodging it against the mouth of her womb as he fed.

He understood, now, why Eli’s eyes started to go half mad the moment he had first tasted Tori’s blood. It was neither vampire, nor human, but something else, something exotic and hot, tasting of life and death, sex and love, intoxicating and addicting.

Outside, a howl ripped the air.

Inside, Eli bellowed out as he shot the hot tight little hole that engulfed him full of creamy sperm, while Tori screamed—black explosions of light blocking her vision—and inside her mind, something that had been weak and withered to begin with, snapped and shriveled and faded away, taking with it the last lingering darkness that had plagued her mind since the night she’d had this change forced upon her.

There was a powerful force gathering inside her, as that darkness faded, something inexplicable, something beyond light, beyond strength, beyond the evil that had tried to claim her.

Declan flooded her vagina with hot pulsing jets of seed and growled against her throat, one hand cupping and molding her breast, while he jack-hammered his cock inside her, riding his orgasm to the very last drop.

Tori’s body seemed to dissolve and her soul exploded, hot darting lightning bolts of pleasure coursing through her before it all started to fade. As she collapsed, she felt two strong pairs of arms surround her, and a soft brushing stroke of her mind that felt and smelled of Declan.

With a sigh, she succumbed to the call of sleep, her mind, belly and heart full.

She lay cupped between their bodies, quivering, and unconscious.

Eli, still nestled snug in her bottom, murmured softly, “It’s been an age since I was able to fuck a woman into a stupor. I have to always take more care with my humans.”

Declan stroked his hand over Tori’s flesh, feeling the rough touch of goose bumps chilling her skin. Though Eli’s body was warm now, it would eventually cool, and it would leech away whatever heat Tori had. Declan snagged a blanket and covered them before saying quietly, “Something inside her is gone. I’ve sensed it before, but I thought it was because of the change. But it was her sire. His hold on her is gone. That taint is gone, I can’t smell it, or feel it, or sense it.”

“I know. I recognized his touch, though it took me some time to place a face to that feel, I recognized his taint the moment she entered my territory,” Eli said, resting one hand on her hip, stroking his thumb absently over her flesh. “That is why I forced that confrontation on Tori when she first came. Not for form, but because I needed to make certain she was not feral.

“I do not follow the rules that so many of my kind cling to. Unless, of course, those rules suit my purposes. Any may enter my territory, so long as they pose no threat to me or mine, so long as they follow my rules.” He met Declan’s gaze, his golden gaze sad and lonely and sighed, saying, “He can not call her, can not claim her, can not control her. Her soul is her own again. Her heart, however, belongs to you.

“She is yours, now. God, how I envy you.”

Declan’s lids slid down, shielding his eyes from his friend. He also still rested inside Tori, his semi-erect cock twitching occasionally. He hadn’t intended to hurt Eli, but he realized it had happened. Declan had found something that Eli had been searching for centuries to attain. And not only had Declan found it, he had asked Eli to help him keep it, he had allowed Eli to take her body and taste her, taste them both.

But soon they would leave.

And the vampire would be alone, again.

Eli sighed and murmured, “Do not do this to yourself, pup. She was always yours, and though I may yearn, she isn’t for me.” With a soft laugh, he added, “But I hope, if she is willing, you may find it in yourself to share her again.”

Rolling his head, Eli stared out the window into the night. “He has been here, his essence. I can feel it. Will you take the fight to him, or let him bring it here?”

“Tori’s call.Her fight, her call.”

“Urge her to remain here. Though she is not in his thrall any more, he is centuries old and will not be easy to defeat. On my territory, I can offer defense to whom I will. And if she starts to falter, I will aid her.” Eli snuggled closer to her and murmured, “I am weary. Do you know how long it has been since I’ve done this?”

Declan remained silent, his hand curved possessively over Tori’s hip.

He kept it silent, but he could feel Tori’s every heartbeat, like an echo in his chest. He had felt the orgasm that had rocked her, the breaking of that insidious hold, and wondered if she would feel it as well.

Eli had caught the backlash of the bonding, Declan was certain. But he hoped it was something that would fade from him. While he may not have any problems sharing Tori from time to time with his friend, he had no intention of sharing her completely and indefinitely.

“We will stay here,” Declan said, shifting and moving until he could rest his head on Tori’s chest, feeling her soft, shallow breaths. “He is near anyway.”

Stupid bitch.

Foolish bitch.

Traitorous bitch.

Fleeing and hiding and surviving when she had been meant to die, slowly and painfully and alone.

Worse, she had found a protector, a bloody shifter. One who had the look and smell of a hunter about him.

And the English fop of a bastard.

Oh, Manuel hadn’t forgotten Eli, hadn’t forgotten slipping from the bastard’s grasp nearly two centuries past. Elijah Crawford, one who hunted and destroyed his own kind. Instead of bathing in blood and relishing the power of being immortal, the fool clung to the ways of his human life, spouting harm-no-one shit and protecting the humans.

They were all going to die.

Fucking in that bed, feeding off each other, using the body that he had thrown aside.

She shouldn’t have lived. But since she had, she belonged to him.

The shadow, an extension of himself, hovered by the window, watching with wide eyes that missed nothing. Manuel paced the confines of his resting place and plotted while the shadow watched. The shadow was supposed to lure the bitch out of Eli’s stronghold and seize her mind, holding her until Manuel could arrive.

Instead, she had thrown off his summons again, while she let the two men fuck her in unison.

The fact that watching them had aroused Manuel beyond all reason, beyond any hope of satisfaction, infuriated him even more.

Oh, they were all going to die.

The shifter first.

He’d seize the bitch first, and hold her, while he killed the shifter in front of her. Then Elijah Crawford. His human, a little less handsome now after several brutal beatings, wasn’t quite so human anymore. Manuel had lost control and fed too much, letting the man hover too near death, leaving Manuel with no immediate servant at hand. Manuel was left with no choice but to force a bond on him.

Now the man was a true slave, inhumanly strong, his mind receptive to Eli’s every whim, his will and mind all eradicated under the lash of Manuel’s power. He could feed off of blood, off of food, but mostly he would prefer flesh.

His slave would take care of the vampire, using the holy water soaked garlic first, and then, while Eli lay wounded, beheading him.

The woman would be last.

And she would pay for defying him, for refusing his summons.

Maybe he’d allow his slave some pussy, or a piece of ass, before they killed her and fed. Between the two of them, they could feast on her blood while they fucked her raw and ripped her apart.

But first, Manuel had to wait for his slave to return with dinner.

After fighting half the night to bring her to his side, Manuel’s reserves were wearing thin. Not that she was too strong for him. It was simply the distance. Yes, the distance. And the men that surrounded her would block much of his summons.

Once he was there, he was certain he would control her again.

Of course, his shadow was already there, had been there half the night.

And she still slept on, cuddled between the two men like she hadn’t a care in the world.

Manuel snarled, his fangs gleaming like ivory in the darkened room. The shadow seemed to flinch from his wrath and when the door opened, the slave hesitated.

Manuel stared at the pale blonde dancer and laughed. “My little dancer,” he crooned before launching himself at her.

She went down screaming.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Tori awoke at dawn, right as Eli was sliding into slumber. There was an eerie prickling awareness of him in the back of her mind. She knew he was aware of her waking, and jealous of it. She knew he was aware of her, her scent, her warmth, the blood in her veins.

“What’s going on?” Tori asked quietly. So much of the past night was a blur. She remembered it vaguely, and that miffed her a bit. She wanted to remember in great detail. And she was tempted to kick Declan’s ass for springing it on her.

But, like that eerie prickling awareness of Eli, she was aware that Declan hadn’t put her up for a three-way fuck just for doing so.

She could feel his words in her mind before he even replied. “We helped you break your sire’s hold,” he murmured against her chest. The puff of air from him speaking caressed her skin and her nipples drew tight.

“What else? Why can I feel Eli in the back of my mind? And why are you in mine? It feels like you are inside me, and I don’t mean your cock,” she said, pulling back and looking down at him.

He arched his neck, propping his chin between her breasts, and staring up at her. His eyes shone with love, lust, adoration and need, sending hot little tingles of pleasure down her spine. “I’ve always loved you,” he murmured. “Always.”

Tori’s face heated slightly at that bald, unconditional exclamation. But she wasn’t surprised. She had always known, but hadn’t accepted it. Fool. What woman didn’t want to have all that focused solely on her? “I know that. I love you, too.”

He smiled slowly, a pleased, smug, totally male smile as he rubbed his chin back and forth on her skin, caressing her roughly. “I know that. We belong together. You know that, don’t you, girl?”

The rough, husky words, with that lilt of Ireland, rolled around her, caressing her just as surely as his hands were starting to. Weakly, she replied, “I do.”

“We bonded last night,” Declan rasped against her flesh, pulling her underneath him and spreading her thighs. “Bonded—body, mind and soul. I’ll know your every emotion, and you’ll know mine.”

Tori gasped, her lids fluttered down as he reached down and trailed his fingers against her opening, wet with cream and him, but swollen and sore. “I know you’re sore. I feel it as well. But I want to make love to you, and I can feel that you want it, too.”

Her eyes drifted toward Eli, who slept deeply, that awareness stretched thin and taut. But he was still dimly aware of them. And she felt his hunger for this as well. If this had happened yesterday, she couldn’t have.

No way could she have made love to Declan while somebody else was in the room, sleeping or not. But this wasn’t somebody, this was Eli. And he felt like he was a part of her now.

“He is. We’re linked, the three of us.” Declan kissed his way down her body, nipping gently at one nipple, rolling the other between his fingers, before he continued to trail his mouth down her body. “Will you let him be with us again?”

“You want to share me with him?” she asked, her eyes clouded with lust and confusion. His mouth was creeping ever lower and he was expecting her to carry on a conversation?

“Not share,” he argued softly just before he spread the swollen lips of her sex and blew a cool puff of air on her inflamed, sensitive flesh. “Be with. And not for always. You liked it, didn’t you?” Just then, he stroked her open, from bottom to top, with one wet swipe of his tongue.

Tori shuddered and whimpered, the words, “I can’t even lie to you about it. You know I liked it, why ask?”

“Enough to do it again?” he asked, nuzzling her clit with his nose before catching it between his teeth, gently, and laving it with his tongue.

“Hell, yes.” The two of them, inside her body at one time? Images swirled in her mind, her taking Declan in her mouth while Eli drank from her vagina. Declan’s tongue stroking in and out, like he was doing now, while Eli nipped and fondled her aching breasts.

“We will do that,” Declan whispered as he trailed one finger from her wet clit to her bottom, pressing against the sensitive flesh of her anus.

“Ohhhh,” Tori whimpered as he repeatedly pressed against her rosette while he flicked his tongue against her clit and suckled on it. “Just how…ah, how far inside…mmm, my head can you go?”

“Only as far as you want me to,” he murmured. “You can feel me, too—inside your head—and you inside mine. “ He propped himself up, taking two fingers and sliding in and out of her wet passage. “Close your eyes,” he urged. “Concentrate on me.”

“How can I not?” she asked wryly, her hips rising unconsciously to meet the strokes of his hand. But her eyes fluttered closed and she shuddered, that dim awareness of Declan in the back of her mind rushing to the forefront, and she could feel the way her own body felt to him—could taste the way her body tasted as he slid his tongue inside to gather more cream, could feel the tight, pulsing, pounding sensation that was his cock—feel it as if she was actually inside his body.

She could feel his emotions, his fears, his wants.

She could feel him covering her body while he was wearing nothing but the pelt that covered him after he shifted, taking her like that, underneath the full moon, in the woods. She could feel the intense, insatiable need for sex that rode his back and feel the hunger that he had focused solely on her from day one.

He left her dripping pussy with one last rough swipe of his tongue before he came up her body and spread her thighs; draping them across his while he remained upright on his haunches, pulling her pelvis lower until he could work his cock inside her while they both watched. The fat, ruddy head of his penis stretched her swollen opening and she flinched a little, Declan soothing her with gentle stroking caresses on her hips. Her breath left her lungs in a shuddering rush when she lifted herself on her elbows to watch with him as his thick cock sliced through her until he was buried inside her—the furred sac of his balls swinging against her bottom with each deep, gentle stroke. She hooked her ankles together just atop his butt, holding him deep inside her. Her body quaked as he used the flared tip of his cock to stroke that tiny spot inside her body. She wanted to feel his body against hers but before she could move, or even voice the urge, he had grasped her around her waist and drew her up, catching a tightly beaded nipple in his mouth as he aligned their bodies, her sitting astride him and rocking her hips slowly.

Lifting his head, he stared up into her eyes as he took her bottom in his hands and lifted her weight, guiding her in a slow, easy rhythm. Declan groaned and muttered under his breath as her silken sheath contracted around him, tight, hot and wet—swollen from his and Eli’s rough usage of her the past night. “So fucking sweet,” he murmured, nipping at her lip before kissing her gently, his tongue sliding inside to taste and seduce as one warm hand left her hip to cup her breast, his thumb stroking the nipple.

“Mmmm,” she murmured, licking her lips after his left hers. “Tell me about it.” His taste intoxicated her—salty, spicy, so totally male, but so uniquely him. “Want another taste,” she murmured, seeking out his mouth.

His hand tightened on her ass and he drove a little harder inside her. Tori cried out, squirming on his lap, rubbing herself against him. His hand left her breast to circle around her throbbing clit and he went back to rocking slowly inside, stilling her attempts to drive herself down on his cock. “You’re too sore,” he rasped against her mouth.

“I want—”

“I know what you want,” he said with a smile as his fingers gripped one ass cheek and pulled, separating her crevice, exposing her puckered rosette to the gentle caress of air. “But you can’t have it right now. I want to love you right now. Love you, not fuck you. Ride me. Just ride. Let me take you slowly, Tori. Let’s let it last a while.”

His final words were whispered against her breast as he trailed his mouth down and closed over one nipple, raking his teeth gently against it before sucking and taking her flesh deep inside his mouth.

It built slowly this time, every time Tori sought to plunge and thrust, his hands restrained her. By the time the climax had built inside her, she was sweating and panting, tears flowing down her cheeks, her skin stretched tight and hot as though her entire body was going to explode the minute the climax rolled through her.

“Now,” he whispered against her mouth, feeling the tight, clenching caresses of her sheath as her body tightened and prepared for orgasm. She was hotter and wetter, straining and panting—pleading and crying out against him. He gripped her shoulders and forced her down, rocking inside her as she shattered against him, cream flooding from her body as her vagina vised down around his cock.

Tori sobbed as it rolled through her, each wave seeming to last longer than the last. His cock pulsed inside her and she screamed weakly when she felt the hot jets of his sperm flood her. Another orgasm wracked her body as her head fell back, her body going limp while he continued to thrust and rock inside her, riding his orgasm until she had drained him dry.

He rolled them to their sides, Tori’s body pressed once more between his and Eli’s. She felt the hard pressure of Eli’s cock at her back and she flushed, realizing just how aware part of him really was. Vaguely, she grew aware of something, a dull pounding ache between her thighs. When Declan eased his semi erect shaft out of her, tears flooded her eyes and she gasped in pain. Soothing kisses dried the tears from her eyes while Declan murmured in her ear, “I’m sorry, baby. So sorry.”

She felt the rising tide of guilt and self anger that rose in Declan and she arched up to press her lips to his mouth. “Shh,” she whispered. “I’m fine, just not going to be up to much playing for a while.”

He wrapped his arms around her and held her tightly. “I want you so much,” he muttered as shame and anger flooded his gut. Sympathy pains, or echoes of the pain Tori was feeling had his lower abdomen and groin throbbing and aching and he could only imagine how badly she was hurting now. “I’ve been told the need does lessen, in time.”

“Need?” she repeated, curling her knee up slightly, stroking one hand down his stiff side.

“Aye. You’re my mate, you see. The shifters, inherents or otherwise, have a driving need for a mate. Once you find it, you want it, always and forever and you’re overtaken by an urge to mark your mate,” he said quietly. “I’ve known you were mine since I first saw you, and I’ve controlled the urges. I’m afraid I am losing control now. All I have to do is think of you and I get hard. The need to mark you and ride you and fuck you constantly is driving me insane. I can’t control it.” He didn’t speak of how the urge to fuck had been augmented by his need to do everything to protect, until the need had near driven him insane.

But she knew.

With a smile, she kissed his chest, nipping gently at one flat nipple before she said, “I think of you and I get wet. Stop feeling bad. I heal quick, right? That’s part of this. And it was worth it.” She closed her eyes in remembered ecstasy—the feel of his cock inside her, the feel of being pressed between their two bodies. The feel of Eli thrusting that thick cock of his in her ass while Declan pummeled her vagina. Even the thought of it had tight little spirals of need spiraling through her belly, even though her aching pussy begged for a respite.

Oh, yeah. Worth it.

Declan’s shame at his lack of control faded as he felt that deep satisfaction that radiated from her. “You’re not angry, are you?”

“For what?”

“I bound us together last night. And I never gave you a chance to say no,” he said, lifting her chin and staring into her eyes. “You understand, don’t you, that ya canna go walkin’ away from me, from us. Not now, likely not ever.”

“Can you force this bond on somebody who doesn’t want it?” she asked, a frown furrowing her brows. Part of her rebelled at anybody taking a choice from her, but another part, something inside her heart she had barely even known existed, rebelled at anything that could separate her from Declan—even her own anger. And it wasn’t like she had ever had a true choice anyway. They were meant for each other.

“No. It cannot be forced,” he said, his accent thickening into that rough brogue that had shivers running down her spine. “The bond goes both ways. It’s not a marriage, but a union, our hearts and minds and souls melding to one. That cannot be done to one who isn’t willing. But that doesn’t mean I had the right to let it happen, if I could have stopped it. Or let you know it was likely.

“I knew it would happen, if I let it. I could have stopped it, simply by not touching you.”

With a brush of her fingers against his mouth, she asked, “Is not touching me a simple thing?”

He seized her hand, pressing a kiss to her sensitive palm, stroking it with his tongue before taking one finger into the wet cave of his mouth and sucking it, his rough tongue caressing and stroking before he drew it out and said flatly, “No. It’s the hardest fucking thing I’ve ever done, to not touch you. But—”

“No buts. Declan, I love you. I think I always have and while I don’t like having choices taken from me, this isn’t a choice. It would have happened, it was meant to happen. And I can’t think of being without you, when you are so much a part of me now,” she said, staring into his face, caressing his roughened cheek as she kissed his chin. “I love you.”

CHAPTER NINE

It was later in the day that she grew aware of the malevolent force that was battering at her mind. It was like a battering ram that was trying to get in, and the longer it fought and failed, the more the anger grew.

“He’s here, isn’t he?” she asked quietly, braving the sunlight at four in the afternoon to stare briefly out the window. The blinding light hurt her eyes, and as moments passed, it started to sting her skin, but she stared into the woods beyond the wood and glass houses, beyond the small guesthouses, wondering where he had gone to ground.

“I do not think he is on Eli’s territory yet,” Declan said, taking her hand and guiding her from the window, letting the heavy, light blocking drapes fall back down. He had carried Eli into a middle room, his bedchamber, a windowless room that was protected from any and all sunlight. It wasn’t a basement room, though. Eli had a dislike of such things, a remnant from his human days.

“He is,” she whispered, her eyes closing while her mind went drifting down a dark mental path.

“He is close,” the wise old woman whispered. “He had his slave bring him while he slept. He must hate you very much, to have traveled in his sleep to get to you. He is certain you will run, and he doesn’t want you to have the chance.”

“I’m not running,” Tori said softly, pacing the room.

“What?”

Tori ignored Declan’s voice while the old woman murmured, “I know you will not run. That is why I chose you. I need your help. Until Manuel is gone, I cannot rest.”

“Can you tell me your name? Why would you help me? I will see him dead—you know that, don’t you? Why help me when you know I will kill your son?”

“My name is Rosa, and I help you because I do know you will see him stopped, I know Manuel better than all others, and his evil, foul deeds. I help you because he must be stopped.”

“Why me?”

The old woman laughed and replied, “Why not you? You threw off his compulsions. You fought against him. You hurt him. Manuel hasn’t been hurt by a human since before he was changed.”

“How long has he been a vampire?”

Tori stumbled in her tracks and came to rest against the wall as Rosa said sadly,” More than five hundred years. Manuel was an Inquisitor before he was changed.”

“ Inquisitor?” Tori thought, her mind whirling.

“The Spanish Inquisition, when Isabelle sought to purify all of Spain. Her purifying was the most foul and evil deed I had ever seen done…at the time. So much evil in the world, so many evil, terrible things I have seen. I am weary and long to rest.”

Death toll in the hundreds of thousands, people pulled from their homes and cast into fires. Tori’s mind stumbled to a halt and stared unseeingly out the window. “He was alive then?”

“He was. It was how he met the man who changed him. He took pleasure in what he did, in the suffering that he caused.” Her sad, mournful sigh brushed through Tori’s mind like a cold wind. “He was always evil, from the time he left my body.”

“Oh, God.”

“God had nothing to do with it. He was just…evil. Always evil. Five hundred years he has traveled this world, inflicting his evil and malice on others. It is time he be stopped.”

“Five hundred years? Vampires get stronger with age, don’t they?”

“They do. But you are not just a vampire. And you are not alone.”

Declan’s hands landed on her shoulders as another voice joined in. Declan’s mind was troubled and in turmoil but his mental voice was strong and clear. “She will never be alone, old woman.”

“Old woman, handsome wolf?” Rosaasked, her voice light with amusement. “Hmm. Go, Tori McAdams. Go be with your mate, but be ready. Manuel is too foolish to fear the wolf.”

Her mental touch faded and Tori fell back against Declan.

“She was his mother,” she murmured a few moments later. “I don’t know much, but I know he sought out the vampire and wanted to be changed. And then he fed from his own mother and killed her.”

“Five hundred years,” Declan whispered. “He was born about the time the Spaniards settled in Florida. Manuel will be strong.”

“She said he was an Inquisitor, as in the freaking Spanish Inquisition. Burning people, torturing people, dragging them from their homes at night and killing them,” Tori murmured, her head spinning. Too much. Too much to take in.

“She waited for me,” Tori said, her voice gruff and thick with tears. “I might have died, if she hadn’t been whispering in my head. She helped me, but it was because she thinks I can kill him.”

“She’s caught, Tori, tied to her son for always, unless somebody is able to kill him. Can you blame her for taking a chance on a strong woman?”

Shaking her head, she wiped away one tear with the back of her hand. “I don’t blame her. I pity her, I hurt for her. But what if I fail her?”

“We won’t,” Declan whispered.

Failure wasn’t an option, not to him.

Failure meant death.

Tori prowled the house, as the sun edged down lower. It was late afternoon, but sunset was still hours away. The summer brought long hours of daylight, confining the creatures of the night to their lairs.

“Stop pacing, Tori,” Declan said in exasperation. “You’re making me nervous.”

The roiling energy in her gut was begging for release. She had noticed, after feeding from yet another of Eli’s people that her body was eased and the aching between her thighs had faded.

And she recalled the euphoric, powerful strength that rolled through her after sex. She turned and propped her back against the wall, her fingers going to her shirt, watching Declan as he tried to focus on a book. She caught his attention before her shirt had opened to her navel. Peeling back the sides, she opened her bra, the lace cups falling away to frame her breasts. “Change,” she ordered in a soft voice as she flipped open the button of her jeans.

“Excuse me?” Declan asked, his eyes latched on her naked breasts as he rose from the chair.

“Change,” she ordered in a hot, smoky voice, rolling her shoulders and sending her shirt floating to the floor. “You fucked me your way last night. Now I want to fuck my wolf.”

“You’re too sore,” he rasped, his erection pressed against his jeans. Mouth dry, he stared hungrily at her naked breasts and licked his lips.

“No. I’m not. Change. Or don’t you want to?” she asked with a pout.

His head fell back, his teeth bared in a pained, silent snarl as the flow of fur started the change—his hair lengthening, thickening and spreading down his neck, back, and chest.

Fur flowed downward and his arms flexed, shifted as the muscles bulged outward and enlarged while the hair raced down his arms. His nails shot out, became longer, curved and deadly.

The ridged muscles of his chest and belly became more obscured as the fine line of hair between his nipples spread outward and became a furred pelt that covered his entire torso, spreading around his trunk and back.

His jeans fell around him in shreds moments later as his enlarged muscles tore the seams, his hide darkening and mellow gold fur spreading to cover his body. His cock rose, naked and ruddy, from the thinner hair that covered his groin. Longer and thicker, it jutted up and Tori licked her lips when Declan closed one clawed hand around it, stroking carelessly while the change completed.

His muscles shifted and bulged as he moved slowly toward her. “Suck it?” he asked, the words a soft growl as he guided her to her knees and urged her mouth open with a clawed finger. Her mouth stretched tight, too tight, around his thickness and she whimpered, her pussy wet and hot, tight and hungry. She couldn’t take him all the way down her throat like this. He was too long, and too thick; the feel of him bruised her throat as she took him inside in slow, hesitant strokes.

He pulled away a moment later and stared down at her, his hooded eyes glowing and green. “On your knees. Fuck you like that.”

She turned slowly, presenting her ass and bracing her weight on her hands. “Don’t want to hurt,” he said, his voice deep and growling, sending shivers down her spine as he dropped to his knees behind her.

“I want you to,” she said darkly, rocking back and brushing her ass against his pulsating length. “Hurt me a little. I need it.” Reaching out, she felt for him along the mental path that joined them and felt his need. “You need it, too, Declan, don’t you? I can feel it inside you, like an animal caged. You haven’t let him out once with me. Let him out now.”

In answer, his hands, big and hard, covered with fur and tipped with ebony claws, closed over her hips and he drove inside her. Halfway in, her body started to resist and he pulled out, worked his cock back in again a few more inches, then out. Back in a little deeper, out, over and over again until the tawny gold of his furred belly stroked the pale curves of her ass as he drove inside her, forcing her to take his entire length, a rough grunt falling from him as he stared down, watching his ruddy cock, wet with her cream, spear the swollen lips of her sex.

He lifted his hand and smacked her ass roughly, shuddering as her flesh pinked under his sharp slap.

Tori mewled and thrust back against him, the burning biting pain in her pussy making her delirious. She yelped when one hand landed hard on her backside in a slap. A second one had her keening, and the third one had her bucking up.

She could feel his hot cock as it stretched her sheath almost unbearably, her flesh resisting his brutal intrusion while it held him deep each time he started to pull out. Another hard slap on her bottom, followed by another, and she pushed back, taking him inside again. “Harder,” she begged. “Deeper. Faster.”

Declan went wild, shuttling his cock in and out while she screamed and pleaded beneath him. He shoved her hips lower, angled her ass a little higher until her torso was flat on the floor and her ass was in the air, canted up so that he slid across the bundle of nerves deep inside her passage with every stroke. She closed over his cock tightly—making him growl as her passage fought it every time he plunged back inside her sweet depths. Sweet little fuck, Tori, he thought, feeling her along the mental paths, speech coming easier through their bond than it did vocally in this form.

He felt the silent pleading racing along the bond and raised his hand, spanking her again, admiring the way the cheek of her ass pinkened under his blows.

“Like fucking your wolf?”

“My wolf,” she whispered, her body shuddering as he lodged himself deep inside her. She felt the silken hair of his pelt caressing her ass and wondered how it would feel to take him in this form with her on her back, him between her thighs.

“Find out,” he offered, pulling out and flipping her onto her back before she had even realized he could sense what she wanted.

But once she figured that out…He lay between her thighs and, using two claws, spread her lips gently before sliding his long tongue out of his mouth and into her sex. Tori screamed as he flicked and stroked inside her, pulling away to lick and nuzzle her clit with his nose. He grabbed her behind her knees and shoved her legs high, lifting her bottom off the floor as he pierced her vagina and pulled her onto his length roughly, forcing her thighs wide, staring down at her.

“Feel good?”

“Oh, yes,” she murmured, relishing the tight swollen fit of his body inside hers, the gentle, alien brush of his fur on the sensitive skin of her inner thighs.

“Slow?” he asked, stroking his length in and out gently.

“Or fast?” And he drove his length inside her, hot little licks of pleasure pain flooding her body.

“Fast, oh, please, Declan, fast,” she begged, her head thrashing on the floor. “I don’t want gentle right now.”

“My baby,” he purred inside her mind before lunging and driving deep inside her body, the flared head of his cock leaving her vagina before driving back in, each rough stroke dragging across her swollen engorged clit until she was panting and pleading and begging.

“Look…”his rough urging forced her eyes to their joined bodies and she sobbed as she watched him surge into her, his thick width pulling out, wet and gleaming, the dark curls at her mound caressing his length, and then he was driving back inside, as they both watched.

They both heard the door open, and both were aware of the vampire watching them, well away from the partially open blinds and the sunlight that filtered through.

Tori shuddered as Declan whispered in her mind, “He likes to watch almost as much as he likes to fuck.” The touch of his mind on hers was almost as intimate as the feel of his cock pulsing inside her, almost as arousing.

With a smile, she rolled her head until she could see the handsome blond vampire in the door. Clenching tight with her inner muscles, she smiled slowly as Declan growled and lifted her hips, cupping her ass in his hands, thrusting more deeply inside. Eli closed his eyes and muttered, “Evil little bitch,” under his breath before opening his eyes and continuing to watch.

Declan’s hands stroked up and down the back of her thighs before he pushed her knees to her chest, and fell forward onto her, driving his cock in deep, stretching her to the point of pain. He caressed her arched neck with his muzzle, nipped gently at her shoulder while he shafted her, driving her closer to orgasm, relishing each tiny plea and broken scream. Rolling his maned head, he glimpsed Eli and his mouth gaped in an evil grin, causing Eli to laugh weakly. “You’re a bloody bastard, Declan.”

Declan lifted his weight slightly off of Tori, keeping her knees hooked over his arms as he pulled out and surged slowly back into her, shuddering at the hot wet clasp of her swollen tissues around the engorged flesh of his cock. Taking her legs, he pushed them together, grunting as it caused her sheath to clasp him even tighter, and then he propped both her legs on one broad shoulder, holding them there with one hand and working the other one around until he could scrape her clit with a gentle claw.

“Scream again,” he told her, reveling in the bond that allowed their minds to meld just as fully as their bodies. One hand lifted and landed sharply on her ass and she jolted, a weak scream falling from her lips as her muscles tightened. Declan slapped her butt again and she vised down around him, her walls milking his shaft as she came, ripping his own climax from him in a long pulsating blast.

He growled in approval as he filled her wet depths with his seed, her body slowly relaxing around his. Her boneless arms fell to the floor and she lay there, panting, her legs still propped on Declan’s shoulder as he rolled his hips, rocked inside her a few more times, letting her drain him dry, before he released her legs and curled up next to her on the floor, smiling at Eli over her body. He cupped her breast in his hand, stroking her softened nipple with his furred hand. The palm was smooth and hairless, broader and longer than a human hand.

Tori felt it, sighing in pleasure, curling up against Declan’s furred chest, feeling the familiar touch of his hand on her body. Her lids lifted and she met Eli’s eyes before her gaze drifted down and encountered the thick heavy bulge behind his flowing linen trousers.

“You’re such a naughty little thing,” Eli murmured, stroking one hand down the length of his covered, throbbing cock, his back propped against the wall. “If I was still human, I think I would have died of jealousy. Or a heart attack.” He rubbed the base of his palm against his chest, drawing Tori’s attention to the slow, steady pounding of his heart.

A low ripple of power sighed through the air and she felt the fur receding from Declan’s body. Soon, he was curled around her—human, smooth, sexy—so damned sexy he made her mouth water just looking at him. Lifting himself onto his elbow, he peered at his old friend through his shaggy bangs, a smile curving his mouth as he continued to fondle and tweak Tori’s nipple.

“You cannot say you did not know what was taking place, old friend,” Declan said with a shrug. “If you didna want to be watching, then why watch?”

“I never said I didn’t want to watch,” Eli said, his hot eyes trailing from Tori’s glowing face and the smug smile on her mouth to where Declan held and plumped one white globe in his hand, the nipple red and hard once more. “I’d prefer to play with you, but I doubt I’ll be invited again.”

Tori’s lids drifted down slowly before lifting back up and meeting Eli’s golden gaze. “Not now, but you’ll be invited again,” she promised, her tongue wetting her lips.

Eli approached her warily, his eyes narrowed and hungry. “Again, hmm?” he murmured, dropping down to his knees and lowering his head until they were nose to nose. Slowly, he covered her mouth with his and slid his tongue inside hers, between her fangs, so that he could taste her. When he pulled away moments later, she was breathing heavily and staring at him with dazed eyes.

“A promise I hope you intend to keep,” Eli purred before sitting back on his heels. Staring at Declan, all emotion fled from his face and he said, “Night approaches. He will be here soon. Unless you want to face him in your lovely white hide, Tori, I would suggest you clothe yourself.” He drew the air in through his nose, tasting the faint sweat that dewed her body, the scent of Declan’s body on hers, in hers. “It will infuriate him, knowing that the wolf has been touching you, marking you, fucking you.”

Declan lowered his head to hers and kissed her swollen mouth hungrily, gently. Then soothingly before he pulled away and murmured, “Loving you.”

Tori accepted the hand Eli offered and sat up, glancing out the window to where the sun hovered just on the horizon, blazing orange, the clouds around streaked with pink and silver. “Can he take daylight?”

“Not last I saw him,” Eli answered.

“You know him?”

“I’ve fought him before.”

“Can I…can I win?”

Declan rose and lifted her to her feet, cuddling her back against him, pressing a gentle reassuring kiss to her neck. Eli rose to his feet in a boneless, lazy movement, the subtle power inside him easily cloaked for now. “I’ve no doubt of it. You already have. You broke his hold. Tonight, he will learn that.”

“Is Declan his match?” she asked, looking from the vampire to the wolf.

Eli lifted a brow and said, “I would dare say, yes, he is. I don’t know for certain. But you must fight him. Not your wolf. This is your battle.”

“I know that.” She met Declan’s eyes. “Can you beat a Master?”

He smiled smugly. “I can, and have.” Then his muscled, naked shoulders lifted in a shrug. “But five hundred years…that is a powerful mark to reach. And this cannot be my battle alone. I can face him with you, but not for you.”

Tori looked back to Eli and took a deep breath. Declan hadn’t really answered her. “Are you stronger than he is?”

“A hundred-fifty years ago, I was, yes. I imagine that is still true. Manuel Rodriguez has reached his plateau and I’ve yet to reach mine.” He stroked one hand down her face and lifted her chin, staring into her haunted, frightened, blue eyes. “You’ve not even begun to rise to what you will be. He can not defeat you, Tori. Of that, I am certain.”

With a shuddering sigh, Tori said, “The old woman, she is his mother. She’s trapped here, until he dies. I need to know that she will be able to move on, no matter what. If he ki…” Her voice trailed away and she hesitated for a long moment, her throat tight with fear. “If I can’t beat him, will you kill him? She deserves to be at peace.”

Declan growled, clutching her tightly against him. “You will not face him alone, Tori. And we will defeat him.”

Stubbornly, she said, “I need to know, that if I fail, he will still die. He can’t do this to anybody else.”

Eli met Declan’s eyes over her pale naked shoulder and said gruffly, “He does not leave here alive. That, I promise you.”

CHAPTER TEN

Manuel pressed through the invisible cloak that marked the edge of Crawford’s territory. The other Master had taken his bitch—that was all he could focus on.

Had taken her, saved her and fucked her.

And the wolf…Fuck, how he hated the shifters. Hated them with a passion. But this wasn’t just a wolf, not just a shifter. He was an Inherent, Manuel suspected, and most definitely one of the hated Hunters.

It was the worst sort of betrayal, letting not just another Master fuck her blind, but to let a wolf fuck her. And both of them, the Master and the Inherent, were Hunters.

She had let the wolf between her legs and into her pussy. That had been his. All of her belonged to him.

And he was going to get her back.

He hovered at the edge of the tree line, staring in fury at the brightly lit house, with all its windows and laughter. The bastard lived as though he were still human, in a house, with people he provided for. The English bastard drove a car, for pity’s sake. Spoke on the Council Of Hunters, had the authority to decide when the Hunters would strike.

Manuel couldn’t possibly admit it, but this was part of why he hated Eli. Being a Hunter, he was safer from the rest of the world than the ferals were. Nobody hunted the Hunters, nobody was a threat to them. A feral feared fighting a Hunter, not just because of the death that most always came, but because, if by chance, the feral won, the rest of the Hunters would descend upon him and tear him apart.

A slim figure passed in front of the window and Manuel’s hands curled into tight fists.

The woman.

She was the reason he was here.

He’d get her back, even if he had to kill them all to do it.

Hell, he’d prefer to kill them all anyway.

He watched, enraged, as she strolled back in front of the window and lifted it. Unaware of the light touch on his mind, he glared as she leaned out, drawing the cool, clean night air into her lungs.

With a puzzled frown replacing the fury on his face, he listened, ears pricked and eyes searching.

She hadn’t changed.

Her heart still beat.

He could hear the faint sound of air moving in and out of her lungs.

And as he watched, she lifted a fat, juicy orange to her lips, and bit down on the peeled wedge, juice trickling into her mouth, down her chin. She chewed, swallowed, took another bite.

Manuel watched, entranced, as she polished the fruit off and daintily wiped her mouth. She hadn’t changed. How was this possible?

He had bitten her, watched as the blood drained from her body. He had fed her and made sure the change had started before leaving her alone to suffer and die of starvation. But she hadn’t changed.

He moved a little closer, certain she couldn’t see him with her still human eyes.

But then she propped her hands on the windowsill and grinned, right at him, moonlight gleaming off her pearly fangs. “There’s my sire, all ready to play,” she purred.

And she leaped out of the window, dropping the twenty feet to the ground and rising to the balls of her feet, staring at him with her head cocked, her eyes wide. The faint bulge of her fangs behind her upper lip betrayed the innocent expression on her face, giving voice to the hunger that was churning in her gut.

Hunger for his blood.

“Why, you look like you’ve seen a ghost,” she murmured.

A shadow separated itself from the house and Manuel watched as the wolf placed himself protectively at her back, one hand resting on her shoulder.

Another shadow slid away and shifted, a moving drift of gray fog that hovered between Manuel and the woman, hovering for brief moments, taunting Manuel. The Spaniard seethed silently at this show of power. So very few Masters ever attained the ability to shift to other forms, yet Eli had mastered them all by his first century.

The fog solidified and reformed, until Eli Crawford stood between Manuel and the bitch he had come to take.

“Do you like the monster you made, Manuel?” Eli asked, his hands in the pockets of his trousers, his pale naked chest gleaming in the bright silvery moonlight. “She walks in the sun, and she threw off my compulsion as easily as she did yours. I watched while she sat and ate lasagna. Do you know what is in lasagna, Rodriguez? Garlic. Tons of it. She washed it down with wine and chocolate. You remember chocolate, don’t you?”

“She’s still human. And weak,” Manuel spat, his body quivering with rage. “She was too weak for the change, too weak to become like one of the gods.”

Eli laughed. “Weak? Aren’t you in for a surprise.” he stated, pacing a large circle around the three of them. He stopped just beyond Declan, who had dropped to his heels, one palm resting on the earth, while he stared at Manuel with unconcealed rage. His back was arched, the muscles and bones underneath shifting restlessly as he fought to control the urge to shift and pounce—to take the vampire down and rip his throat out.

Eli paused only long enough to squat down and whisper, “Her fight,” before rising to study Manuel.

“You know about the bonds between a wolf and his mate, don’t you?” Eli asked Manuel. “You tried to break it.”

“She had no bond,” Manuel hissed. “None.”

“She’s my mate,” Declan said, his voice a low rough growl. The glinting green eyes glittered with rage and hate and fury and Manuel felt a spark of fear in his gut. “From the day we first met, I knew she was mine. You tried to break that.”

“She had no bond,” Manuel repeated. “And this involves neither of you men. I sired her, and by laws of old, she is mine. That is a bond, wolf. And you tried to interfere, tried to keep me from my property.”

Tori laughed. “Property? I am no man’s property.”

“I sired you. I own you,” Manuel said with a leer. “Body, soul, mind. Your pussy and the ass you shared between them. You will pay for that, I promise you. You think I didn’t know, didn’t see you fucking the two of them? I saw every damn time they pounded their dicks into you, and for each and every single stroke, you will pay, little puta. Now, come.”

Tori only smiled.

“Come!” Manuel ordered, inflicting his will into the word. And she did nothing.

“You protect her?” the Spaniard asked, glaring at Eli with hatred and incredulity.

“I’ve no need to, Manuel. She is not yours. She broke your hold.”

“She belongs to ME!” Manuel bellowed. The windows trembled and shook, and the birds in the forest took flight and the night around them grew silent. “Come to me, you little cunt, now.”

Declan’s lips peeled back from his teeth in a ghastly smile, his teeth lengthening just slightly, just enough to remind Manuel what he was. “Watch how you speak of my mate, vampire. Watch, and remember what we are.”

“She isn’t one of you,” Manuel hissed, unwittingly falling back a step. “I broke no Council law when I took her and she is not one of yours. I took her and I control her.”

“Then why doesn’t she come? Why don’t you try to take her mind, if you are so certain you own her?” Eli suggested. The wind picked up and threw long golden locks of his hair into his face. Absently, he brushed them aside and lifted a brow at Manuel. “Well?”

Manuel called.

She only smiled.

He threw every bit of his strength into compelling her, and she laughed.

“You protect her!”

Eli rolled his eyes. “Check for the bond, you fool. I protect no one. She stands on her own, and you’d be wise to fear the creature you made.”

Manuel did search. And the bond wasn’t there. Instead, when he reached for her through the mental paths, he was thrown into a maelstrom of blinding golden lights shot through with glittering threads of silver and blue, caught in a cage he couldn’t understand. He was trapped, caught, paralyzed.

Until he felt a warm, living hand on his cheek. The bonds that now bound him loosened enough to allow his eyes to open and he stared up at her. At some point, he had collapsed to the ground and he caught the bitter metallic taste of his own blood in his mouth.

“What are you?” he rasped. How could this fledgling vamp hold him like this? He was more than five hundred years old, and a Master.

“She is less than a week old, and already a more powerful Master than you could ever have hoped to become,” Eli said, dropping to his heels and staring at Manuel.

“How?”

“I stopped the change, and followed another path,” Tori said, her voice low and throbbing, full of some power Manuel couldn’t recognize. “An old woman showed me the way.

“Her name was Rosa. Do you have a ghost haunting you, Manuel? Someone you were bound to, someone you hurt?”

The vampire’s eyes widened and he struggled uselessly against the bonds holding him. “You lie,” he rasped, a forgotten memory rushing to the fore as she said that name. Kind eyes and a loving smile, followed by disappointment and shock and pain. The guilt he had left behind when he lost his humanity was returning, and he hated it. “She is long dead.”

“Long dead, but not forgotten,” a soft voice whispered. “You’ve kept me chained to you, with every foul, evil deed, with every young life you ended, you kept me chained. I have watched you always. And waited.”

The whisper had sounded through the night and all heard it. But only Tori kept her eyes focused on Manuel, kept her mind focused on the bonds she had wrapped around him under Rosa’s tutelage.

A rapid spate of Spanish fell from Manuel’s lips and he shook his head, staring in the air just beyond Tori. Declan watched with wonder as a white, silvery cloud shifted and formed just in front of them. Formed into the face and then body of a young noblewoman, her long hair bound up in the back, covered by a net that was strung with jewels. Her gown was long and heavily embroidered, with a low, square neck that revealed a smooth bosom, and two neat little pinprick holes in her neck.

“How could you help her, Madre? She was meant to die, she hurt me and she was meant to die,” Manuel wailed, sounding like a child.

The woman, so sweet and innocent looking, shook her head and said, “I gave birth to a monster. You became more of a monster as you grew. And when you were changed, it only worsened. I bore you, allowed you to become what you are now. And then you took her. And I saw my chance to make amends for the evils you have done.”

Tori said quietly, “Rosa, you are not to blame for what he did with his life.”

Sad, large eyes met Tori’s briefly. “A mother always feels guilt when her child goes astray,” she said with a shrug of her shoulders. “I must make amends, and I must know that he will cause no more evil. And then I can rest.”

Tori shifted and stood. “You do not need to see this,” she said as she started to loosen the mental bonds that held Manuel captive.

“Yes, I do,” she said with grief filling her eyes.

Tori leaped aside the moment she let the last mental rope fall, nimbly avoiding Manuel’s lunging reach for her. “Kill you,” he grunted. “When you’re dead, she will die with you.”

“She’s already dead,” Tori said. “You killed her five centuries ago.”

“Because she refused to see, I could have made her invincible and we would have lived forever, together.” Manuel fell back, circling her, wary of the strength he could now sense in her. “I could have given her the world, but she wanted to remain human and mourn the death of the cowardly bastard she whelped first, the one who took everything that should have been mine—the title, the lands, the woman I wanted. I killed him slowly, and painfully, like I will kill you.”

He dove for her, but she was gone like the wind, moving faster, with more agility than a vampire. When he turned, searching for her, he saw her standing more than a dozen yards away, smiling at him serenely.

“What else did my beloved Madre show you?” Manuel demanded. “You are a fledgling. You cannot hope to defeat me.”

Eli offered offhandedly, “Do you know what her first meal was? Aside from the steak she ate when she awoke after you changed her. The wolf. He was the first to feed her, and he did so willingly.”

“Agile and fast, like a wolf.Sly, cunning, and strong like a vampire. Able to walk in sunlight and live as a human.”

“Don’t you know yet what she is, my son?” Rosa asked, her white form hovering above the ground, between Manuel and Tori.

“That is legend,” Manuel spat, moving to go around the ghostly form of his dead mother.

“She is legend. Legend made flesh. Only a handful of others like her have ever existed in the world. And you helped make her. Didn’t you suspect—when you couldn’t trap her mind before you sired her—didn’t you suspect she would be different?” Rosa asked, drifting away and allowing Manuel to see Tori again.

“My lady,” Eli said quietly, dropping to one knee in a courtly gesture, waiting until her eyes came to rest on his bent head. “Let them finish it. Say your good-byes to your son, and let them finish it.

Sadly, Rosa said, “I said my good-byes long ago. He is not my son.”

And she faded into nothingness, leaving Manuel to search desperately for her. “Madre, come back!” he cried, spinning to search for the insubstantial form.

“She doesn’t want to see you now,” Tori said quietly. “She only came because she wanted you to know how you brought this upon yourself. And that she is the one who finally found a way to stop you. You swore she never would, and she swore she would.

“She was right.”

“No, Huntress, she was not,” Manuel said, turning to face Tori.

Huntress.

Not just a Hunter, but the Hunter, the one all others would turn to if they failed. Tori felt the flood of knowledge hit her mind, and absorbed it, as Eli and Rosa finally let her know what she was meant to be.

Huntress.

“Come and get me, you bastard,” she taunted, her jaws aching and empty. Her fangs slid out, longer and sharper, glinting and deadly, as Manuel rushed her.

With a strength and skill she hadn’t known she possessed, Tori caught him, spun him and flung him. She leaped and landed on his back, lashing out along the mental path and binding him. “I want you to know the fear I felt,” she crooned in his ear as she grabbed hold of his hair and jerked his head aside. “I want you to know the fear Rosa felt. The fear all your victims felt when you stole their lives.”

Rearing back, she struck, sinking her fangs into his neck and feasting. His blood, once tasting so bitter, slid down her throat like liquid gold and flooded her with a blinding light, washing through her body in caressing waves. She felt the moisture gather between her thighs, felt her nipples tighten and harden as she fed.

His fear filled the night and she gloried in it.

His heart kicked up, ten beats, forty beats, ninety. Each panicked heartbeat pulsed more blood, more strength from his body into hers, until his heart faltered and stopped altogether. When she drained the last of the sweet blood from his veins, the energy building inside her broke and she shattered, climaxing with a cry as she fell from Manuel’s still body and into Declan’s arms. She came, cream flooding from her body to soak her jeans, all her muscles clenching, then relaxing, leaving her dazed and replete, staring up into the star studded sky, seeing nothing.

“That was…unlike anything I have ever seen,” Eli said sometime later. He stood guard over Manuel. Though his energy was depleted, the vampire still lived, and could still escape, if the mental ropes Tori had on him slipped.

Declan’s cock was hard and throbbing against her hip and she whispered, “We are all sick, perverted freaks. I just came after I drained a man dry, and you two got hard-ons from it.”

Declan laughed into her hair, cupping her crotch, feeling the moisture that had soaked her, breathing her scent in. “Sick and perverted. Can we do it again?”

Eli cleared his throat and nodded to the still body at his feet. “We need to finish this. Tori?”

She eyed the body nervously. The knowledge that ran through her brain told her she could kill him completely if she took his head. Or the sun could finish the job. She couldn’t imagine taking his head and all three of them knew it—through the mental bond they shared—one that was wide open right now.

She knew before he spoke what Eli would suggest. “If you leave the bonds on, the sun will finish it.”

She also knew it would be long and painful. She would feel it, and experience it. “No. That is too brutal. I will not be a monster, not even to kill one,” she said softly against Declan’s chest.

A shutter seemed to slide down, blocking her from him as he settled her on the ground, stroking one hand down her hair.

She rested, reveling in the total satisfaction, the bliss that filled her body. Eli barely glanced at Declan, his golden gaze rapt on her face. “I think perhaps I should fear you as well,” he said, half joking, “if killing a vampire puts that look on your lovely face.”

“He was evil. That was what made it so sweet,” she whispered, her lids drifting down. “The death of evil fulfills me.”

A soft mental stroke had her eyes opened and she stared up into Rosa’s face. Make it quick, she pleaded, her eyes full of grief and pain. He is not my son, but he was, once.

Tori reluctantly nodded. She had started this, and it was her responsibility to see it done. But before she could figure out how to behead the vampire, Declan had returned. She watched in confusion as he doused the still body with gas.

Rosa’s body jerked with a sob, and Tori gripped her tightly in a mental hold, trying to comfort the sorrowful woman as Declan tossed the gas can aside. Manuel’s eyes flew open, but the bonds still held, and he couldn’t move.

The flaming match fell from Declan’s hand and the Spaniard went up in flames. A long, painful, hideous shriek filled the air and then all was silent. It took only a few seconds for the body to turn to dust. As soon as the flesh was consumed, the flames went out, the wind blowing the dust around.

Rosa gently shrugged Tori’s hold off. And for a moment, her ephemeral form solidified and she reached out, caught Tori’s face in her hands, rising on her toes to kiss one cheek, then the other. “My thanks, always,” she murmured.

And then she started to fade, her body becoming glittering white and sparkling, like faerie dust, Tori thought, before it drifted upward, flowing up and away from them.

“Be at peace,” Eli said softly from the safety of the porch. He had moved away from the body quickly once he realized what Declan was up to and now he moved back to them, studying the scattering pile of dust, the charred grass around, dampened by the water Declan had thrown the minute Manuel’s body went up in blazes.

“It wasn’t her fault,” Tori said softly, staring up into the sky. The glittery silver cloud was gone from her sight, but it was a sight she was certain she would never forget. For a brief moment, she had felt that light inside her, felt the peace, the warmth, the love and acceptance.

And her fears had faded. She wasn’t evil. That soft beautiful light had filled her, and soothed the lingering doubts.

She wasn’t a monster.

She was the Huntress.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Eli stood in his chambers alone. He had sent his bedmate away after he had awoken and fed. Her sweet blood had filled his belly but he still ached.

He heard them coming. He remained by the fireplace, staring down into the deadly flames. And he wondered, not for the first time, if he would ever have the strength to touch that fire and let the flames burn him, and release him.

“It would be no release, Eli. Merely an escape, a weak one at that,” Declan said from behind him.

Tori stood in front of him, her hands linked with Declan’s, which were crossed in front of her waist.

“When do you plan to return to your home, Declan?” Eli asked, his tone bored.

“Soon enough.”

“Tori will need to mark her territory, so that the ferals know a Master Hunter now protects it.”

“I’m aware of that,” Declan said.

Eli turned back to stare into the fire. “I had planned on either training her myself, or finding another vampire Hunter to do so. Our strengths are different from yours, and I had intended she be well aware. But you already know what you need to know, don’t you, Tori? Huntress?”

“I haven’t sifted through all the information in my head, Eli. I don’t know what I know or don’t know. I certainly don’t know how that knowledge came to be there. But I know that if I need you, you will come,” she said quietly.

He heard soft muffled sounds behind him but he didn’t turn to see. “You know I will.” They had forced themselves deep inside him, inside his head, his soul, and his heart. Eli wanted to hate them for that.

It was so much easier to simply exist, to keep all others at a distance so he didn’t feel their departure so deeply when they left, or died. She was moving closer and Eli stiffened his body.

The jealousy inside his gut was a deadly thing. But it wasn’t a jealousy for her, exactly. Rather that Declan had found a mate, something Eli had been searching and hoping for. And he hadn’t ever found it.

When her hands landed on his waist, his eyes closed. “What do you want, Tori? If you’ve a need to feed, Declan can take you out. Or ask one of my people.” But go, and leave me be.

“We want to keep a promise.” Her slender feminine hands reached for his shirt, hanging loose and open over his lean belly, and drew it down his arms.

When she pressed against him, Eli knew what sounds he had heard. She was naked—he could feel the firm, warm push of her breasts against his back, the hard peaks of her nipples, pressing tightly against him. He whirled away from her and stepped back, staring at her lithe nude body.

Declan had flopped into a chair, naked now as well, one hand cupping his balls, stroking his shaft idly while he watched. Tori stared at Eli with hot, hungry eyes. “You’re a part of us, Eli. We feel you inside us. I do not like to know you are hurting.”

“So you plan on the three of us living together, a happy threesome?” he asked mockingly.

Her lips quirked at that and she shrugged. “I love Declan. He has my heart. But we want to be with you.”

“One more time?” he queried, shaking his head. “The last thing I need is to be with you and make me want you more and more, and know I’ll never have it again.”

Declan asked roughly, “Who said you couldn’t? Tori wants it, I want it. You want it.”

“So you are willing to share her? Let me fuck her?” Eli demanded, feeling the lust build inside him, side by side with the despair.

“If we weren’t willing, we wouldn’t be here. Take what is offered, Eli,” she murmured, moving closer and trailing her hands down his smooth, muscled chest. One hand paused briefly over his heart, pounding hard and heavy against his ribs, then they moved lower, to shove his pants down, freeing his aching flesh. She caught his cock in her hands, stroking lightly as she asked, “Isn’t that what you told me?”

Eli grabbed her and whirled, pinning her between the wall and his body. Turning his head, he stared at Declan with tortured, hungry eyes. “Will you let me have her? Just me?”

Declan’s eyes glittered and narrowed. But he nodded slowly. “If Tori is willing, I will.”

“And will you stay, and watch? Suffer what I have suffered?”

Declan smiled sadly and shook his head. “I can not suffer as you have. I have her heart. But we can share our souls, her body.” Settling in the chair, Declan started to pump his cock with his hand. “Your time will come, Eli. You will find your match. Until then…”

“Until then,” Tori repeated, catching his mouth with hers and tangling her tongue with his. The fat flared head of his cock probed her labia and she arched in invitation.

He dropped to his knees in front of her instead, staring up at her with adoring eyes. “My life, my soul is yours,” he murmured, catching her hips in his hands and diving for her dripping passage, laving the plump outer lips before spreading her and thrusting into her with his tongue, drinking down the creamy moisture like a man dying of thirst.

Declan stared at them with wide eyes that swirled and shifted. His cock bobbed in his fist insistently, demanding he go and take his place. He stayed seated, watching as Tori’s hands fisted in Eli’s hair. Along the path of their bond, he could feel her rising pleasure, feel phantoms of the pleasure Eli was giving her as he ate at her pussy.

Her misty dazed eyes met his across the room and he shook his head, and mouthed, “Eli,” while he stroked his cock quicker and harder.

Inside her, along that odd bond the three now shared, she had known how badly Eli hurt and how badly he needed this. She couldn’t deny him now, any more than Declan could.

And oh, the pleasure. His teeth closed over her clit and tugged lightly, and Tori lifted her hips pleadingly for more.

Her lids drifted closed and she climaxed with a scream, the pleasure that ripped through her echoing in Declan’s body and causing a tiny stream of come to jet from his shaft to land on his belly. Never breaking rhythm, he watched as Eli rose and ripped his pants away. But Tori evaded the hands that reached for her and fell to her knees in front of him, licking a trail from the base of his penis to the head, before she opened wide and took his cock inside her mouth.

“Fuck me,” Eli gasped, falling back against the wall and catching her head in his hands. He rocked his hips against her mouth, pulling back instinctively when he felt the muscles of her throat close around the head of his cock.

But she slid further down, the muscles loosening, until he was buried inside her silken mouth and throat all the way to his balls. “Damn it, she’s sweet,” he muttered as she fell into a rhythm that took his fat cock completely inside her. She would hold him close and tight for long seconds and Eli went half mad, grasping her head and pounding into her mouth.

He dimly felt the echoes of sensation that raced through her, through the bond they shared and knew he was forcing too much of his cock inside her. He started to pull back when he felt the burning of her lungs but she growled and closed her teeth around him in threat, urging him back into the rhythm.

“She doesn’t have to breathe much, Eli,” Declan said gutturally, aware of the mental tug of war. “Let her have it.”

Eli felt his control break and he dug his cock in, burying it down her throat and rocking in hard, tiny feverish movements until his come blasted from him to pulse down her throat. He held tight, letting her swallow every last drop before he pulled away.

She fell back, her lips red and swollen, her chest heaving as she gasped for air. Eli grabbed her and lifted her, bracing her back against the wall and drove his still hard shaft deep inside her body. She was wet and tight, her body resisting the abrupt invasion. “Take it,” he rasped. “Please…take it.” He felt the echo of the burning sensation in her belly and thrust again, driving his fat cock into her a little deeper each time. “You took it already in your mouth, in your sweet little ass. Take it here again.”

Her resistant tissues slowly relaxed to cling and caress his length. She stared up at him with glassy eyes as he drove in a little deeper. She could feel him deep inside, parting her, stretching her, bruising her. With a subtle flexing of her inner muscles, she clenched around him as he started to pull out and push back into her slowly.

He stilled and whispered, “Don’t.”

She did it again and smiled a smug cat’s smile as he bellowed and pulled out, ramming back into her repeatedly. Hot streaks of pleasurable pain coursed through her, tightening her muscles and her belly until she was twisting on the cock that impaled her and begging for release.

His fangs nicked her nipple as he swooped low to take her stiff peak in his mouth, suckling and nipping as he drove his cock inside her wet depths. Sweet, sweet Tori, he crooned inside her mind. Come for me, let me feel it. Let him watch it.

Her eyes went blank and she screamed when he drove in at the same time he smacked her ass with the flat of his hand. She went in spasms around him and cried out as he flooded her body with cool, soothing jets of seed.

Moments later she felt him pull out and she tried to drop to the ground, utterly weary.

But Declan’s hands gripped her waist as he forced her face down over a chair, exposing her wet folds, dripping with sperm and cream, and the tightly puckered hole of her anus. “My turn,” he growled, smearing the natural wetness around her hole, his cock already gleaming from the lubricant he had brought with him.

Tori struggled to rise, but another set of hands held her down as Eli rounded the table and dropped to his knees beside her. Covering her mouth, he took her into a drugging deep kiss, sliding one hand down to flick her clit as Declan started to press against her hole.

“Not yet,” she whispered, thrashing against their restraining hands, even while she relaxed her muscles, letting Declan ease his finger inside her. He hissed as she closed over him, tight and hot.

Eli slid inside her mind, wrapping her in a web of seduction, stroking away until she relaxed and forgot her weariness, while he made love to her mind. He ended it with a kiss as she screamed in climax and then Declan buried his pulsating, ruddy cock in her tight ass.

“A vampire is a psychic creature,” Eli purred inside her mind, using gentle bonds to hold her body still, bonds she could easily break if she chose. She whimpered under the touch of his mind on hers while Declan shuttled his length in and out of her ass. “I can fuck you with just my mind touching yours. Feel him, Tori. Feel how hot and hungry he is for you, how much he loves you. Adores you.”

His mouth took hers again and he added, “I adore you. So sweet, so hot, so female and soft.”

Tori felt a strangled gasp in her throat as Declan raked her shoulder with his teeth, urging her to straighten from the table. Doing so left her body unsupported and forced him even deeper inside. He whispered in her ear, “Tell Eli to fuck you with his body, not just his mind.”

Her head whipped back and forth before he caught her hair in his hand, holding her still. “Do it. Or I’ll stop. I can let him feed from me. And he knows how to fuck a man with his mind just as well as a woman. I’ll come all over you and let you die a little inside from the hunger.” He felt her hesitation as she eyed Eli, who was waiting and watching with hungry eyes.

“You want it, Tori.” She felt him murmuring against her hair as his hands came around and cupped her breasts, pinching and rolling her nipples. “He’s bound to us, to you. You feel it, how badly he wants you? His needs eat at me—and you. Tell him.”

“Your body,” she whispered on a sigh, reaching for him, feeling Declan’s approval. “Not just your mind.” Hell yes, she felt it. It was what woke her from a sound nap a few evenings ago. He had risen from his slumber and scented her, wanted her, and Tori had awoken hungry and needy…for Eli. All because he had awoken thinking of her, and Tori realized she was the completion of the circle.

Eli grasped her legs and lifted her hips just a little higher before he steadied his cock and let her weight fall, taking both of them deep inside with one tight caress. At the same time, he slid inside her mind, battering down the defenses she had tried to throw up, knocking them down until he held her mind with his, controlling her body, her dripping vagina, her quivering ass, controlling her orgasm, holding it just out of reach.

He waited until he felt Declan start to pull out and then he thrust in, her body wet from his previous climax, taking his cock more easily this time. He felt the movement through the tissues as Declan shuttled back inside her. Falling into an opposing rhythm, they rode her hard, Eli catching one pebbled nipple in his mouth while Declan pinched and tweaked the other. Eli felt her arch and cry out, twisting in frustration before she snarled, “Damn you, let me come.”

He wrapped his web of seduction just a little tighter, until she couldn’t speak. He also took her mouth, driving his tongue half way down her throat, tasting peaches and sex, the taste and scent that had driven Declan half insane, tasting his own recent climax as he ate from her mouth.

Declan grunted and growled against her neck, his hips pounding against her ass as he took her in short brutal digs. He could feel the quaking in her body that she couldn’t control and he relished it. Declan reveled in controlling her body while Eli controlled her mind, knowing that she was willing to do anything they asked, if they would just keep fucking her.

The walls of her anal sheath quivered and caressed his cock like a silken fist and he had to throttle down the need to come. Eli slid inside his mind, just a little, to help hold off the climax that would trigger all three. “A good fuck, she is, eh, mate?” Declan growled as he reached around and pinched one nipple roughly.

“Damnation, yes,” Eli purred, rolling against her in a slow penetrating rhythm at odds with Declan’s furious pounding digs in her ass. Tori gasped for air and pleaded silently for release, damning Eli for the bonds he had placed, and herself for not simply snapping them. She flushed and heated as they spoke around her like she was a rag doll, her breath hitching as they compared what it felt like to pierce her body.

“Sweet, hot little piece of ass,” Declan crooned against her neck. “Like digging my cock into electrified silk.” He slowed his strokes to slow and gentle, shallow and easy, feeling Eli do the same.

“Tight wet sheath,” Eli added, as he drove his length into said sheath. “Soft, wet and sweet. Your cream is addictive.”

Her head fell back against Declan’s shoulder, lifting her breasts while she blasted them both with heated curses through their shared bond. Her arched back lifted her breasts prominently and Eli cupped one, flicking his thumb over her nipple repeatedly while he said in a conversational tone, “Such pretty tits, as well, round and white and firm. If only I could take what I needed from them forever, I could die happy.”

Tori was going to die, or she was going to kill them. Eli still held control of her mind and both men limited her control of her own body. Declan laughed roughly when he slipped one finger inside her mouth, only to have her bite down and lick at the bleeding marks she left.

“Let her go,” Declan said gruffly, feeling the enormous pressure of his own release building behind the wall of Eli’s mental webs.

Eli released her and started to pound into her vagina roughly, hungrily, while Declan reamed her ass with his cock. They sought purchase on her body and Tori cried out when they ended up linking their arms for leverage and driving into her body with brutal, uncontrolled force. She cried out in delicious pain and felt her body break open, cream saturating her as wave after wave of pleasure swamped her, as climax after climax took her helpless body, still held under their faultless control.

Declan came in a hot pulsing jet in her backside just as Eli pumped the last of his seed inside Tori’s receptive pussy while another climax, longer and slower, wracked her body from head to toe.

Moments later they slid her to the floor and they all three collapsed, the men sliding from her body with soft, wet, sucking sounds. Eli rolled over just as Declan did until they cupped her body between them.

Weakly, Tori whispered, “A very pleasant way to keep a promise.”

Eli took her mouth gently, kissing her softly and deeply before pulling away to buss her cheek. Over her body, he agreeably said, “Indeed. And as long as we can have this from time to time, I think I can easily die a happy man.”

Tori laughed weakly and cuddled against Declan, feeling the solid warm strength of him surround her as she said, “We need to find your match Eli, and soon. Otherwise, I may start to crave this always.”

Tori stood in the full summer sunshine the next afternoon, basking in it while Eli slept a deep silent sleep. He was aware of her though, and he caressed her mind gently and whispered “Good-bye for now, Tori McAdams.”

Declan led her to the car, eyeing her cautiously. “Are you certain we shouldn’t wait any longer? We have hours of sunlight left.”

Her face lifted to the sun, drinking it in, delighting in the gentle caress of air over her body. “I’ve nothing to fear from the light, Declan. Not now.”

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