“Good enough for you?”
Yup,
Chaplin answered. He’d been mind-connected with Gabriel most of the time, except for there at the beginning, when the dog had first confronted her in the domain. What’d been said between the two, Gabriel couldn’t be certain, but he’d pretty much put the puzzle of the conversation together, along with the images the dog had shown him about Mariah’s attack a couple nights earlier.
“Angry, ain’t she?” Gabriel said.
Chaplin finally seemed unable to avoid the drugs in his system as he answered in a dragging cadence.
She’ll probably go to the workroom, as usual. It helps her calm down. Maybe she’ll sleep well with you outside. At the very least, she just learned something about her limits, and she needed that. Badly.
“You want me outside,” Gabriel said. “It sounds as if you hope I’ll keep my distance.”
Chaplin paused, then thought,
There’s a hunger, Gabriel, and it’s been building.
So there it was. “If you can sense that in me, you probably also know that I’m getting better and better at conquering it.”
The dog hesitated again, as if carefully setting out his musings. It almost struck Gabriel as too deliberate until the canine thought,
Maybe you should just consider drinking some blood from that flask of yours. It might even help to dig a good spot out here under the dirt for your coming rest.
That stung. And it also made Gabriel determined to prove the dog wrong. He could overcome the hunger just fine.
He jerked his chin at the dog as they came to the main entrance. “Understood, Chaplin. You need me around because of Stamp, but you’re going to make sure you protect your mistress, too. I get it. You’re a jerk when you need to be.”
I’m only doing what I have to, Gabriel.
“Aren’t we all?” He lifted a brow. “Including you?”
Gabriel meant to broach the subject of any plans Chaplin might have for him, but the dog was spent, stumbling to the trapdoor and going through it while Gabriel made sure the spring-loaded dirt spiller covered the entrance sufficiently. He shouldn’t have bothered.
As he vowed to talk to Chaplin later, he searched out his flask in the ground, took a good drink, and assumed his guard duty, the shotgun tucked in his arms. But the longer he stayed outside, the longer he wanted to show Chaplin that there was nothing to worry about with him.
Carrying a chip on his shoulder had been a shortcoming as a human, too, Gabriel thought. Throughout his life, he’d been doubted by teachers, not responding to so-called cures for dyslexia, feeling stupid except when it came to working with his hands on the intricate patterns of handmade furniture only the elite could afford. Of course, when he became a vampire, the dyslexia had started to fade after about a year and a half, and by now, only a little remained, just as if his extraordinary body was healing it.
Now, Gabriel just wanted to show that he could be just like the rest of this community. He wouldn’t go inside for long before he came back out to bury himself beneath the dirt. Just enough time to make his point to Chaplin. And himself.
After entering the domain through the ladder door, he put the shotgun back on the wall and found Mariah’s coat bunched on the ground, like she’d just shed it there in a fit of disgust with her pet.
Yet the dog hardly seemed bothered, since he was already sprawled out near the common-area tunnel door, unconscious. Gabriel poked him, and Chaplin didn’t even stir.
Out for the night, all right.
Then his heightened hearing picked up Mariah in the food prep area, where she’d shut a folding pocket door to block everyone out. After a moment, she opened it, looked at him, then went back inside, leaving the door open.
He took that to mean
Come in
, so he did. Unexpectedly, she shut the door behind him, as if making her own point to Chaplin, though the dog was beyond seeing it.
“Is he knackered, the little dickweed?” she asked.
“Yup, down for the count.”
She was still dressed in her nightclothes, her fists at her sides as she stood before a counter littered with pieces of uncooked sand-rabbit she’d been chopping up.
He recognized her pique, because her eyes were still a flashing green, just as they’d been outside. Obviously, she needed to get her frustration off and away, and Gabriel was a fine target.
Okay then.
“That mutt thinks he knows everything,” she said, cleaning the cutting blade and shoving it in a drawer, tossing the meat in a bowl, then washing her hands in the pump sink. Gabriel couldn’t help but notice how her nightclothes clung to her, offering a view of her curves. Along with the heightened noise of her body he’d experienced outside, it all made him shiver with want.
As if spent, she leaned back against the tall, metallic cooler, wiping her hands down her face. “I’m just tired of all this.”
“Tired of . . . what?”
When she lowered her hands, he saw the same exhaustion he’d witnessed in Abby when she’d curled into that invisible womb on the bed in the Southblock sanctuary. His instincts responded to this, following the same pattern, the same need to make things right for Mariah now.
But with Abby, he’d wanted to bite her to save her. With Mariah, he knew it’d be out of the greed he tried so hard to keep in check.
Bad-guy greed?
Maybe that quality was all too obvious in him, especially with her standing there in her nightclothes, nearly as bare as she’d been the other night.
Too late, he realized that he was seeing Mariah through a red haze, that it’d gone so far that his eyes had to be revealing his cravings—and they weren’t just about blood. They were about
her
blood.
The drink from the flask hadn’t done any good. He’d been wrong, shouldn’t have come in here, should’ve listened to Chaplin.
He should get out. Now.
But then he saw the wondering expression on Mariahs face, and it enthralled him.
“Gabriel?” she asked.
He tried to tamp his need down, like dirt over something that refused to stay buried. But when she slowly pushed away from the wall, he heard the raging tempo of her vital signs, an exposed need in her, too.
He’d spent too long fighting his want of her, and he was losing.
“Don’t,” he said, and his tone was deep, hollow. “Don’t . . . move any closer.”
This was the end, he thought. He’d failed to restrain, failed in all his best intentions.
But she hadn’t heeded his comment, clearly fascinated as she continued to come toward him. “Would you . . .” She seemed to lose her courage, then blurted out the rest. “Would
you
be able to make it all go away?”
He kept pushing at his urges, but he might as well have been laboring to get a boulder uphill.
She continued. “Can you go into a mind and wipe certain memories?”
He noticed she was trembling, holding something back, too. He saw the goose bumps ruffling the skin of her bare arms.
“I read in my book that you could sway others.” She was only a few feet away now. “That you don’t even have to bite to accomplish something like that.”
Did she even remember how he’d swayed her earlier? He doubted it, but the question remained hanging there.
“Mariah, I told you I’m not a vam—”
Her anger seemed to return, blazing through her, her blood heating, her temperature flaring as she clenched her hands. “Stop it! You’re lying. I . . .” She swallowed. “And I’m real familiar with lying.”
The smell of her skin . . . hot . . .
Gabriel’s fangs knifed out, and his body moved of its own accord, his conscience a red blank as he took one big step toward her, darted out his hands, and grasped her by the straps of her top, which he used to lift her onto the counter. The bowl of food clattered to the floor.
He was closer to her neck now, and the bloodlust was all-consuming, a summons to resume where they’d been last night, with her undressing and him following through to ram inside her, taking, taking, taking, because this woman burned hot and she could fill him up, making him even more than just an animated, walking body.
He heard her top ripping as he wrapped his fingers in the straps, but he didn’t let go, not even as she pushed her knees and hands against him.
Why couldn’t he get himself in check? Why—?
“No bite,” she said, her voice nearly hysterical. Unable to stop what was coming now, he flashed his fangs, looking into her eyes. His mind switched gears, from lucid to scrambled.
Time to sway her,
his instincts told him.
Time to calm her and then get the bite, just as I should’ve done with Abby, who could’ve been mine.
Could’ve and should’ve.
It was all too much to stop.
He tried to thrust his sway into Mariah’s head, but he hit the black wall of her mind, and the shock of that loosened his hold on her.
He took a step away from the counter, just beginning to realize the horror oft he’d been about to do.
The assault had put Mariah in fighting mode, her eyes wide, bright, her hands in front of her, open and gnarled and ready to scratch out his eyes if he should come near again.
And her scent . . . the same as it had been last night, when she’d undressed . . .
Much to Gabriel’s surprise, she grabbed his shirt, hauling him back to her, then clamping a hand on the back of his head, just below the bandages still hiding the injuries that had healed too quickly for any kind of human.
She forced him to look into her feverish eyes. “Try again.
Try
, Gabriel. No bite. Just my mind. Please. Maybe I wouldn’t have to stay inside this house if you gave me that soothing. Maybe . . .”
He was beyond backing off again, and this time when he peered into her, she was open. He fell right in, surrounded by the black of her pupils, which seemed to clench around him, tight and hot.
Her blood.
The lust for it controlled him.
Since he was inside her mind, she sensed his intentions. With more brute strength than he’d guessed she had, she looked right back into him.
Peace,
she thought.
Can’t you give me just a little peace . . . ?
Needing no more invitation than that, he used his sway to soothe Mariah, and her limbs went pliant as she kept engaging him, hooking him to her.
He sent her the best images he could conjure: Images from movies, when lawns were still green. The happiness of staring at a peaceful sky. What it might feel like to have a fresh, moderate summer wind comb his skin. The smell of what real grass used to be like and the feel of its soft blades against skin.
When she broke eye contact, the thoughts sliced to the present, with her still holding his shirt, his head. She was relaxed now, but he was drained, and he leaned forward, bringing his face to her shoulder. Her body moved with each breath, making him feel as if it might be perfectly natural for him to breathe right along with her.
But. . .
Blood.
He could feel it flowing and pumping in her, and he rested his fingertips against her neck, finding the pulse. There was nowhere for him to go but this way—even the tearing sound in his mind, the last clutches of what he’d grabbed on to out in the Badlands, couldn’t hold him back from doing what his nature needed.
“Is that what you want in exchange?” she whispered, still floating in the peace he’d given to her. “A bite? My blood?”
In answer, he groaned low in his throat.
“It wouldn’t make me one, right?” Her breath warmed his ear, where she’d rested her mouth against him. “Just a bite. It wouldn’t make me a vampire? Because I can’t imagine what that would do to me—”
He shook his head, unable to talk. If there was one thing he knew about being a vampire, it was that an exchange produced progeny, and he didn’t spread his seed around. He wouldn’t have Mariah take his blood.
Her vital signs had calmed, though they were still unstable, and they got even more so when she tentatively ran her hands down his arms.
From her touch, he could sense inexperience, and he thought he had to be wrong. The woman who’d stripped off her clothes and touched herself had all the right knowledge. She couldn’t have been that innocent.
When she slid off the counter and allowed her entire length to coast down his body, her breasts over his chest, her sex skimming his belly as she came to a shaky stand, he was further confused.
She went on tiptoe, nestling her lips just under his ear, and he recognized intoxication in her tone. He’d felt it enough times before to know.
“This peace . . .” she said. “The cost of some of my blood is worth more of it.”
His veins seized up as she leaned back to meet his gaze. Though she was calmed by the sway, her eyes still had a wild glint.