Bound by Night (The Moonbound Clan Vampires) (5 page)

So her choices came down to death . . . or death. That left her with choosing the timing, and maybe the method, of her demise. The vampires would kill her after she finished with the phone calls, but maybe if she went with them, she could use the travel time to plot a way to signal for help or find an opportunity to use the one weapon she had for an escape.

Riker’s eyes flared at the same time she tasted blood. Dammit, she was biting her lip again. In front of a vampire. Might as well ring the damned dinner bell.

“Human,” Riker snapped. “Call off the guards.”

“Go to hell,” she said, with a lot more calm than she felt. But if she was going to die, she was going to go down fighting the way she hadn’t been able to when she was a child.

“You first.” He gripped her chin roughly in his palm and held her face up so she was forced to look at him. And then . . .

Blackness.

F
UCK.

Never before had Riker’s favorite four-letter word been so appropriate. Because
fuck
, they were
fucked
.

He caught Nicole as she slumped against him, a victim of his hypnotic ability. Given how terrified she’d been, he’d expected her to capitulate to his demands and make things easy. But no, nothing could ever be that easy for him, could it?

“Man, I wish I had your hypno-talent,” Myne said as he moved swiftly to one of the windows. “Handy for feeding.”

Riker barked out a laugh. “You wouldn’t use it. You like your food to fight back.”

“Adrenaline adds a pleasantly piquant note to the blood,” Myne said in an obnoxious French accent, as if he were a food critic describing a tasty menu item at his favorite restaurant. “Also, six more dudes are approaching from the main gate.”

Myne wheeled around in a blur; his speed made a mockery of most vampires’ already enhanced movement.
Being a born vampire instead of a turned one came with a shit-ton of perks.

“We can slip out the back. There’s a row of hedges that’ll keep us in the shadows.” Riker had often taken advantage of the area designed to conceal the gardeners’ equipment when he used to sneak onto the property to visit his mate.

Myne glowered at the woman in Riker’s arms. “I don’t like this. She’ll slow us down.” He paused, probably hearing the guards’ shouts outside. “Leave her. We can work over the other Martin.”

Bad idea. The minute word got out about Riker and Myne’s break-in, Charles Martin would ramp up security measures and take every precaution to avoid a similar incident. No, it was Nicole or nothing.

“We won’t be able to get close to the bastard.” Riker hefted Nicole more securely against his shoulder as Myne palmed two long blades from the sheaths on his back.

“Would have been a lot simpler if she’d cooperated,” Myne muttered, putting his spine to a wall to peer between the slats of a window blind.

Riker’d give Myne that one. Now they had to evade the authorities while hauling an unconscious human through the forest. Assuming they didn’t get hunted down and executed in front of TV cameras, that still left them having to take the human to the clan’s headquarters. Had everything gone as planned and Nicole cooperated, VAST would still have been sent after the vampires who broke into the Martin mansion, but kidnapping one of the most prominent
people on the planet was going to launch them into a whole new level of manhunt.

“We don’t have a choice,” Riker said. “If we don’t get Neriya back—”

“Then we rain hell down on ShadowSpawn before they know we failed and come after us.”

Attacking ShadowSpawn clan before they knew what hit them would give MoonBound a distinct advantage, but eventually, the enemy’s sheer numbers and utter lack of ethics would result in MoonBound’s destruction. Riker would never risk that.

No, Nicole was the key to MoonBound’s survival, so she was going with Riker and Myne. One less human in the world, especially a Martin, would only be a good thing.

Myne brought up the rear as Riker hauled ass to the back of the mansion and took the old servants’ passage to the south entrance. The dust on the scuffed wooden floor spoke of months, if not years, of disuse, and the door Riker had seen his mate disappear through too many times had been chained closed from the inside. Myne tugged on the lock. The thing snapped with a loud crack, and they slipped out into the night.

The hedges were manicured to perfection as if frozen in time. Memories clawed at him as they ducked between the shrubs, and he made a point of not looking at the spot where Terese had taken her last breath. The scene had been too well preserved, and although he knew it was impossible, he didn’t want to risk seeing his mate’s blood splashed on leaves or pooled in the grass.

Using the landscape and shadows as cover, they made their way toward the stone security wall. Three rottweiler guard dogs merely watched as Riker and Myne broke out of the hedges and jogged across the expansive lawn. Riker had zapped them with his hypnotic gift on the way in. They’d love him forever now, which was cool, because he liked dogs.

They’d made it just more than halfway before nearly a dozen humans in black-and-red Vampire Strike Force uniforms flanked them. Riker assessed the enemy in an instant, and if Myne’s lopsided grin was any indication, he had, too. These were first responders, their weapons deadly but average.

“Put. The human. Down.” A male with a blond high-and-tight cut that made his head look like a toilet brush broke away from the pack, easing forward in a smooth crouch. “Do it now, or I blow your head off.”

Complying slowly, Riker set Nicole on the ground. As he straightened, he cut a
let’s do it
glance at Myne. In an instant, Myne was in motion. He took down Toilet Brush and another dude before Riker could land his first blow.

Oh, but when he did, the sound of the VAST officer’s jaw breaking was like a stiff shot of bourbon. The officer flew backward, his weapon flipping into the air. Riker snagged it one-handed and whirled, jamming the butt of the rifle into the gut of another asshole who made the mistake of trying to use a shock stick on him.

Spinning, he laid out another guy with a boot to the chest, but as Riker landed, he took a blow to the kidney, followed by a sweeping kick to the back of his knee. He grunted as he hit the ground, narrowly
avoiding a shot from the VAST guy’s AE-47 rifle. One bullet from that particular Daedalus weapon modification would torture its victim for hours as it delivered a series of powerful electric shocks through the body, burning organs and flesh. Vampires had a fifty-fifty shot of surviving. Humans had nil.

Riker shoved his palm into the guy’s throat and watched with satisfaction as the human went down, futilely gasping for air through his crushed windpipe. A sudden spray of blood splashed on the lawn in front of Riker, and he glanced over to see Myne standing over the decapitated body of one of the agents, his fangs buried deep in another’s throat.

The remaining humans either were dead or wouldn’t be recovering anytime soon.

“Come on.” Riker scanned the horizon for more humans, but so far, so good. “The next wave will be here any minute.” And they’d have better training, deadlier weapons, and greater numbers.

Nicole lay where he’d put her, still unconscious, her long strawberry-blond locks spilling over the grass like blood, her bottom lip swollen from biting it. He gathered her in his arms, aware that he hadn’t held a female this way since his mate. But Terese had been smaller. Lighter. Much more fragile. And where Terese had smelled of rose water, Nicole’s warm skin carried a hint of crisp pears.

What. The. Hell.
Why in the world was he comparing the two? They were opposites. Human and vampire. Tall and petite. Evil slaver and innocent victim.

“Hunter’s going to kill you,” Myne said as he fell in next to Riker.

“He’s not going to kill me.”

“But he’ll lecture you with Hunterisms. ‘A dead buffalo can’t cross the plains,’ or some shit. You might as well be dead.” Myne wiped one of his blades clean on his pants before sheathing it. “You know the rules. No humans at headquarters who aren’t food.”

“Who says we aren’t going to eat her?” Riker gave him a sideways glance. “And since when do you care about vampire laws?”

Myne’s gaze raked Nicole, contempt—and hunger—gleaming in his eyes. “Since I decided I don’t want to see you dead over some lowlife human.” Riker cocked an eyebrow, and Myne snorted. “That wasn’t a declaration of love or anything. The clan needs you. You’re one of their best fighters.”

Their
best fighters. Riker didn’t miss the way Myne didn’t include himself as a member of the clan, even after decades of living among them, fighting beside them.

The woman moaned, a delicate noise that should have tugged at the one heartstring Riker had left. Sure, it was frayed, barely hanging on, but what remained sometimes vibrated with a faint sympathetic echo of times past.

Times when he’d had a mate, a child on the way, and hope for a future.

But thanks to Nicole’s family, he now had none of these, so not even her whimpers could conjure a shred of sympathy from Riker.

With a sudden, angry growl, he leaped onto the fence. Nicole shifted, burrowing her face into his neck so her cold nose prodded his skin. Of course she’d be chilly—he’d
taken her out of her warm house and into the freezing late-fall temperatures, and she was wearing only a cream turtleneck and gray slacks with chunky-heeled dress boots. Not that he felt bad. Not when she stood for everything he hated about humans. Hell, given her youthful appearance, she was probably using one of her company’s products, an antiaging serum called “vampire juice” that her scientists had developed to extend human life spans.

Unfortunately, the process
took away
centuries from vampire life spans.

How many vampires had lost their lives to “juice” extraction? Not to mention to decades of experimentation before the antiaging therapy had been perfected.

Riker could feel his rage mounting again. He hated humans. With the passing of his human brother ten years ago at the age of seventy-six, he’d lost his last connection with humanity. And the human race had lost their last decent member.

But if he was honest with himself, he could admit that vampires weren’t exactly a race of sweet kittens, either.

He allowed himself a grim smile as he carried Nicole off the grounds and into the forest, because she was going to learn firsthand about juice extraction. And he planned to be the one to show her.

H
ANGOVERS SUCKED.

Groaning, Nicole rolled onto her back. She didn’t even attempt to contain a wince at the aches in her joints and the throbbing in her head. Maybe it was time to lay off the gin and tonics for good. She didn’t indulge often, but when she did, she often forgot that a mere two drinks could put her on her butt.

A heavy hand came down on her shoulder, and she groaned again. Last time she’d felt this crappy—after a company party celebrating her return to the United States—it had been Chuck who’d found her. And who had teased her mercilessly for weeks.

“Wake up, sleepyhead.”

“Screw you.” She shrugged away from his grip, squeezing her lids tight to shut out any light that would launch her straight into Migraineville. Chuck had thought it was funny to turn on every light in her house before shaking her out of a dead sleep on the couch.

A horrifying thought wormed its way through the hangover haze: he’d also brought one of his servants
with him. Chuck didn’t go anywhere without a vampire to wait on him hand and foot.

Dammit
. She’d sworn to never again be caught in a vulnerable state with a vampire around. She’d told him they weren’t allowed in her house, and if he went against her wishes, she’d assign him to the farthest reaches of nowhere, in one of their one-man-team sales offices.

That was assuming Daedalus’s board didn’t hand her over to the authorities or find a way to boot her out of the company.

“You’d better not have a damned vampire with you,” she muttered.

She swore the air temperature dropped ten degrees. “Honey,” came the husky, southern-accented female voice, “I have an entire army of vampires with me.”