The young female Demon reappeared on the Tokyo street in the midst of four angry Vampires that had been cheated out of a powerful meal. Sure, they had been instructed to keep Corrine alive, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t feast on her quite a bit in the process.
They had seen her. Recognized her. And she couldn’t take the chance that they would report back about her actions. That would ruin everything. So she whipped out the dart gun she had used earlier and shot the loaded dart into the left eye of the first Vamp, sending him down into a screaming fit of pain. The second grabbed her by her hair, forcing her to turn hard around and head-butt her right at the zygomatic arch. The maneuver cut open a gash in her face, but it also sent shards of bone shooting into the Vampire’s frontal brain, dropping her like dead weight.
She pulled a modified ice pick from her belt as she whirled to stuff it and her fist as far as she could through the soft throat of the third Vamp, severing the brain at its stem.
By the time she jerked her hand and weapon back, the fourth Vampire had come to the conclusion that he wanted no part of someone who could take out three of his brethren in under sixty seconds.
He began to run.
She sighed.
She really did hate to run.
Jasmine moaned with the incredible pleasure racing through her veins, like the pulse she normally didn’t have. But something about this Demon brought every last part of her to life, from breath to heartbeat to stunning multidimensional emotions. More than anything, he brought pleasure. The stroke of his hands as they mapped her body completely from head to toe was unparalleled. He made her want to crawl out of her clothes, to strip down to utter nakedness and just rub her bare skin all over his. The craving was as dizzying as it was overwhelming.
“No,” she cried a bit painfully, the word a cross between a moan and a whine. “Demon bitch. I have to go get her. I cannot ...”
Fail
.
Jasmine felt the bitter taste of the word in her mind and it was a powerful countercoup to the incredible pleasure he was making her feel. It was, perhaps, the only thing strong enough to entice her away from all the promises his touch and closeness and extraordinarily sexy body were tempting her with. Oh, how she wanted all of those things he was trying to give her. She was not afraid to admit that she had wanted them for quite some time.
But she wanted them free of this albatross swinging from her neck. She had to find her white whale and destroy it before it had the chance to hurt anyone else. She couldn’t be at peace, couldn’t relax and enjoy this new state of being, until she had extracted this poison from her life. From everyone’s life.
Adam felt what she felt the very instant it fell over her. He felt the passion of her hatred for Ruth, and for the first time Ruth became more than just an average quarry to him. He felt Jasmine’s pain and frustration. He recalled her most significant battle with Ruth as if he had been there himself the day Jasmine, Damien, and Syreena had stumbled upon the traitor Demon and her avaricious Vampire mate in the woods and almost lost their lives to her cunning ability to fight and spellcast. Because of Jasmine’s experience, he was finally able to appreciate the enemy he was hunting. For the first time he was forced to question the wisdom of taking her on alone.
“Jasmine,” he said, his voice rough with the physical need for her that still flooded him. “We will get your Demon. But perhaps we should reconsider facing her alone.”
And just like that, she turned cold in his arms. She pushed him away, stumbling to her feet as she jerked her clothing back into place and tried to run her hands through her tousled hair, as if smoothing the look of it would make everything they had shared disappear.
“Horseshit,” she sputtered. “Are you turning soft on me now, Enforcer?”
“Far from soft,” he reminded her wryly as he drew himself to his feet and his full height. His body was heavily and quite obviously aroused. He adjusted himself a little bit, drawing her attention to the fact against her immediate will.
God, I have got to get me some of that
, she thought fiercely.
It made Adam smile to hear it. Regardless of what she wanted or felt about anything else, she wholly admitted to herself that she craved him. As angry as she might be at him in the moment, she had to acknowledge that their attraction was not going to simply stop because she willed it to be so. She wasn’t going to be able to brush him away like a few tangles in her hair.
“Fine! All right! I am hot for your body and all of that,” she blurted out with exasperation. “That doesn’t mean I’m not going to be all kinds of pissed off if you back out of this on me! I’m not stupid and I’m not so arrogant as to think I could take her on by myself,” she said hotly. “I need you. The Enforcer. This is what you do! You snap Demons back in line. And if they won’t get back in line, you do what needs to be done. I need that, Adam. I need you to come with me and do
what needs to be done
! That last fight she had Nico on her side and yes, it made her unbelievably strong, but you killed him. He’s dead now! She’s all alone, except for the odd minion or two. We have to strike now before she can recoup, before she can start to recruit new blood, take a new mate or even start Summoning more Demons to use against us.”
“Black magic,” he spat, the taste of it on his tongue as vile as the notion of it. It was the ultimate perversion. A Demon Summoning Demons. “It must be stopped,” he agreed. “I am only suggesting that the best way to do this is with a strength of numbers.”
“If we go back now for help, she will disappear again as she always does. This time there will be no trail. She will have time to do whatever it is she does to make certain of it. Adam, you have to believe me,” she said, stepping forward and reaching for his hand. She grasped his palm and fingers, squeezing with her wonderful strength of breed and the passion of her feelings. True, deep feelings. Feelings that had been inside her long before he had come along. “I am not as reckless as others may think I am. I am not doing this in the heat of the moment. I am doing this with the conviction of my beliefs. If I am wrong, if I die, then so be it. It will be worth it if I can hurt her enough to make a difference. To cut her legs out from under her so she can never get her footing again. I’ll die dragging her down with me the whole way. I know you believe in destiny. So feel me, feel my soul when I swear to you that this ... this is
my
special destiny. I was put on this earth, here and now, in this place and time, to destroy the Demon Ruth. Help me. Please help me to do that.”
The passion of her emotion moved him. He could feel it as it stung across her eyes and sinuses. She turned away a little, as if to hide her weakness, but she recalled how useless that was when he was so clearly entrenched in her thoughts and emotions. In fact, she wanted him to know just how genuine all of this was for her, so she embraced it. She let the tears fill her eyes.
“A cavern full of innocent Nightwalkers died because of the way she used me to get to them. My fault or her fault, wherever the blame lies, she has to answer for it. She has to answer for all of her crimes.”
“And so she will,” Adam said with a firm nod of assurance. He drew their joined hands up to his lips and pressed a kiss against her fingers. “You and I together. There is great power in this thing between us. It goes beyond shared thoughts and this magnificent lust. Together we will be a force to reckon with. I feel it in my soul. And we will start with your Demon bitch, eh?”
“You got that right!” she declared, letting out a whoop of joy. She leapt for the sky, flying fierce and free into the night.
Dawn was only a short time away. They were running out of time. Adam could tolerate a portion of daytime hours, but his Vampire mate could not. The sun would roast her like a chicken on a spit, slowly and painfully cooking her from the skin inward.
The thought propelled him off the ground and after her. He followed with as much haste as he could muster in spite of his limitations. He skipped after her, following cloud after cloud, jumping them like a frog jumps lily pads in a pond. Now that he had resolved himself to doing this thing once and for all, he felt almost euphoric. It took him several minutes to realize that euphoria was not entirely his own. It would take some time, this getting used to the presence of another in his mind and emotions. He had his own individual thoughts as he always had, but now her thoughts were inside him and also this strange sort of blending of the two that was growing stronger with every passing second. The Imprinting, he recognized, had already been occurring in earnest, but since she had taken his blood it had taken on a whole new and powerful dimension.
It was almost astounding to him, the idea that he had let a Vampire drink from him. Considering the world he had been living in when he had woken that evening ...
No one can accuse me of inflexibility ever again,
he thought with amusement.
I agree. When I think of the look on Damien’s face ...
It should have been strange how easily they fell into communicating with one another through this powerful mental passageway, but it was as natural as breathing. Perhaps that was what made her fall silent, or perhaps it was her thoughts about Damien and all the baggage she had accumulated with him and his relationship with Syreena. Adam could see it all so clearly as it churned through her mind.
You were jealous of her
, he noted carefully. He had long since realized she didn’t particularly care to be called out on her flaws. She much preferred to admit them in her own way and in her own time.
But to his surprise, she didn’t become angry and she didn’t shut him down immediately.
I think I was more afraid she would become so important to Damien that my relationship with him would fall completely by the wayside. And while there have been changes and I spend less one-on-one time with Damien, I have to admit he juggles us well. We are both important to him and he wishes to please us both, to keep us both happy.
Still, you are verbally abusive to the woman he loves,
Adam noted.
Not as much as before,
she tried to excuse herself.
Time has begun to mellow me toward her.
Adam laughed.
I wonder if she would agree with that assessment.
He felt the sheepishness that skimmed her thoughts. He realized then how much he had underestimated her. He comprehended how little he truly knew about her depths, her passions, and her flaws. But this connection between them was closing the gap rapidly, filling his mind with her in extraordinarily full dimensions. And with each dimension she seemed to grow more beautiful. The wind whipping through her hair, twisting it to and fro, made her look like a storming goddess, a powerful woman in charge of all the elements around her. In a way it was an amusing comparison since he was the only one in control of any elements. Yet cold hard facts had no place in his vision of her, although he had never seen her more clearly. Had never seen anyone so clearly.
“Easy there, Romeo. Don’t get carried away on a wave of romantic drivel,” she shouted to him.
That made him laugh. Perhaps he was romanticizing to some degree. It seemed he couldn’t help himself. Normally he was a creature who worked in logic and stone-cold truths, who clearly saw the line of the law and would not allow himself to see shades of gray. The fact that he had stars in his eyes as he looked at her could be construed as very amusing. His brother would never let him live it down.
At least, the Jacob he knew would have had fun with it. But now his brother was a stranger to him. And he had yet another brother whom he had not even met. His life was in a state of turmoil ... so how was it that he felt so calm and so incredibly centered?
Jasmine felt herself smiling as his thoughts ran almost musically through her head. As a telepath she was very comfortable walking through the thoughts of others, but her ability forced her to do the seeking. This connection with Adam was proving to be like a light that was left on all the time. It was a wonder Imprinted mates didn’t burn out after a while, what with trying to manage and catalogue the thoughts of two beings at once. But as Adam had noted, there was nothing innately stressful about what they were experiencing. It was just unusual. Alien. Yet quickly growing familiar.
She ought to have been more upset about this whole thing, his invasion of her space and mind, the severe alteration of her body and her soul.
She was not. She could not make herself be. Because it felt too much like coming to completion, becoming suddenly whole. Had someone asked her yesterday if her life was complete, she would have absently said yes, disregarding all the empty places she had covered up these past four hundred years, and others that had existed even before she had ever encountered Adam. But for the first time ...
For the first time.
For the first time her body was singing and her soul was in chorus with it. The mixture of their thoughts in her mind and the blood she had taken from him swirled into the choir of it.
Good God, she was on the verge of skipping through a field of daisies in a gauzy white dress with freaking flowers in her hair.
She laughed with him at the imagery. He didn’t understand the reference completely, but he could appreciate the absurdity of it nonetheless.
They both stopped laughing at the same moment, as if it had been planned, when each felt the overwhelming sense of wrongness that echoed in Adam’s blood. All of the Enforcer instincts that had been muted for some reason until that moment came screaming to life. Suddenly every cell in his body went off as though each was an individually screaming klaxon. The Water Demon shot to the ground as quickly as he could, his form shifting from mist to flesh like the whipping back of a curtain to reveal a magic trick. There was, however, no grace to it and no showmanship intended. He was driven down to a single knee as he tried to brace himself against something that was happening from the inside out.