Bound by Night (The Moonbound Clan Vampires) (8 page)

“She’s mine,” he snarled. “When we get her, she’s fucking
mine
.”

He inhaled a breath that burned but was nothing like what he’d felt in the prey room. But how long would that last? Did he have forty-eight hours of excruciating pain to look forward to? And how the ever-living
fuck
had Nicole gotten Terese’s ring?

Myne sniffed the air, doing his bloodhound thing. “I’m not catching her scent.” Frustration laced his tone. Myne hated failing at anything he considered Born Vampire 101. “Which way do you want me to go?”

“South,” Riker said. “If she’s looking for an easy path, that’s where she’ll go.” Total bullshit. The thinning forest to the south would make sense for a runner, but the city was to the west, and if Nicole had any sense of direction, she’d head that way. Which meant no one but Riker was taking that route. “I’ll roll west.”

Hunter spoke up. “You’re sure you’re okay? No one gets the drop on you like that.”

“I appreciate the humiliating reminder, Chief,” Riker drawled. “But yeah, I’m fine.”

If Hunter knew Nicole had dosed Riker with a lethal agent, he’d drag Riker to Grant, their mad-scientist-slash-closest-thing-they-had-to-a-doctor and chain Riker down if he had to. All Hunter and Myne knew was that she’d knocked him out somehow, and that’s how it was going to stay.

Hunter probably saw through Riker’s BS, but he didn’t press. “I’ll get a couple of your teams together to go wide on a search, and I’ll have everyone in the clan scouring the warren.”

There were miles of tunnels where Nicole could hide, but Riker’s gut said she was in the forest. “She’s out here.”

Hunter’s obsidian eyes narrowed to slits. “You fed from her? You can track her?”

Nicole’s heady wine flavor lingered on his tongue, but a large amount of ingested blood was needed to track the donor. “I didn’t feed, but I tasted enough to get a general feel for her.”

The leather thong around Hunter’s temples held his midnight hair out of his eyes, emphasizing his Cherokee ancestry as he inclined his head in acknowledgment. “Good hunting.”

Riker took off, his adrenaline surging hotly through his veins. He loved a good chase and takedown, and this one was going to be especially gratifying.

He smelled her before he saw her, two miles from clan headquarters. Her pear-and-ginger scent made his mouth water . . . until he caught more scents. Human. Male. At least ten. And from the unwashed stench
of them, they were poachers, the worst kind of vampire-killing scum.

He went balls to the wall in a massive burst of speed, leaping fallen logs and cornering hard by pushing off trees. Nicole was ahead, making enough noise to alert a deaf man to her presence.

A flash of strawberry-blond hair between a pair of firs put Riker at thirty yards from his prey. But the stink of a couple of poachers came from maybe a hundred. They were close. Too close.

He sprinted the final distance, catching Nicole as she tried to navigate a gully lined by thick ferns and gnarled berry bushes.

“Riker.” She gasped as he swept her up and over the gully, taking them both to the forest floor on the other side.

“Disappointed to see me alive?” He rolled with her, pushing her beneath him as a bullet sailed over their heads. “You might get your wish soon enough.”

“What the—”

“Poachers.” A spark of hope lit her pretty wide greens, but he was about to dash it. “Chill, Sunshine. They’ll only chop
me
up for body parts. If I’m lucky, I’ll be dead when they start. But you? It’ll be a while before they put you down.”

“But I’m human.” Her dry swallow made the wound he’d sealed on her throat writhe. “I’ll tell them who I am. That they’ll get a reward if they return me safely.”

“You can try that tactic.” He yanked her to her feet and dragged her behind a massive tree. “But more likely, they’ll say they found you dead and ransom your
body. What they’re doing is illegal, and they won’t want you alive to tell anyone what they did to you or what they were out here for.”

“I don’t believe you,” she ground out.

Two shots rang out at the same moment that three men in camouflage burst from the brush. Nicole, the slippery minx, took advantage and wrenched away from him to dart toward them.

“Nicole, no!”

Riker ducked the swing of a machete, only to be nearly laid out by a baseball bat from behind. The blow smashed into his lower back, knocking him off balance. Gnashing his teeth against the pain, he palmed two daggers and struck out at the nearest poacher with a devastating one-two slice that took both sides of the man’s neck down to the spine. As the human’s spasming body hit the ground, Riker dodged more gunfire in an effort to catch Nicole, who had tripped and was scrambling to her feet.

“Help me!” Nicole reached for a burly, black-bearded dude who held an ax like a lumberjack.

Lumberjack’s smile was psychotic, as if he’d just struck gold and was going to take out everyone who knew about it. He put out his hand . . . and slammed his fist into Nicole’s face.

Riker snarled, his anger sparking to insanely dangerous levels. With a roar, he dived into Lumberjack, not caring that several other assholes were closing in. His focus had narrowed to a needle-thin pinpoint that would only end in the ax-wielding poacher’s bloody death.

The man grunted as he hit the ground with Riker
on top of him. Riker plowed his fist into the human’s throat, but as he reared up to deliver the death blow, pain lanced Riker’s chest, nearly as intense as what he’d experienced back at the den. Exhaling on a curse, he looked down at the hilt of a throwing knife vibrating between his ribs.

Riker spared the thrower a glance, judged him to be a lesser threat than the poacher beneath him, and prepared to finish him off. In a single powerful motion, Riker drilled his fist through Lumberjack’s breastbone and ripped his beating heart from his chest.

“Riker!”

Nicole’s breathless shout for help came from a distance. Riker burst to his feet, barely avoiding a crossbow bolt aimed at his head and another chop of a machete.

“Enough with the fucking machete!” Twisting, he ripped the blade from his attacker’s hands and spun, turning the machete into a blender that sliced into two men. Both fell. One wasn’t going to get up. The other would be lucky if he ever ate solid food again.

Holding his ribs, Riker lurched in the direction Nicole had gone. Slowed by his injury but still faster than the humans, he loped through the woods. As he closed in on the asshole chasing Nicole, he wrapped his blood-slick fingers around the hilt of the knife in his chest and yanked the blade free. The poacher was nearly on her when Riker pitched the weapon into the bastard’s spine, dropping him like a rock.

Riker didn’t have time to stop. A hail of gunfire rained down on them, chewing up leaves, tree trunks, and clumps of dirt.

“Son of a—!” He grabbed Nicole by the hand. “Come on.” He half dragged, half carried her through the forest at a blind, desperate run in the general direction of their only hope: caves.

There was a series of caves to the north, built and later abandoned by one of the first colonies of vampires in the area. Now they served as both overgrown lairs for wild animals and temporary hideouts for any vampire needing a place to evade enemies, be those human or other vampires.

“You were right,” Nicole said between labored breaths. “They weren’t going to help me.”

She sounded so surprised. Must suck to learn that some humans were worse than vampires. “No shit.”

A bullet exploded into a tree just inches from Riker’s head. A split second later, another blasted apart a tree branch, and splinters ripped into his jaw and neck.

He dived into Nicole, and they both tumbled down an incline, skidding over dead leaves and banging into dead branches and mossy rocks. At the base of the trench, he pulled her to her feet, hating the fear in her eyes.

“We’ll be okay,” he whispered. “I promise.”

He didn’t stop to think that they were in this position because of her. He just hauled ass with her through the forest, listening as the hunters fell back and, finally, were no longer on their trail. The bastards were tenacious, though, and they’d keep hunting, call in reinforcements, and form a net to catch them.

“Where are we going?” Nicole asked, her voice low and hushed, punctuated by exhaustion.

“To a safe place.” He eased them to a stop and
gave her a second to catch her breath. Gave himself a second to rein in the burning in his upper body. He couldn’t tell if the lava pouring through his chest cavity was from the stab wound or the acid Nicole had dosed him with, but it was getting worse. They needed to get to the caves before he passed out and made it easy for the poachers to butcher him into dozens of different pieces. “I’ll carry you from here.” At her questioning look, he added, “The people hunting us are experts at what they do. They’ll be looking for two sets of tracks.” He eyed the landscape, mapping out a route in his head. “And I can move faster than you can, even carrying your weight.”

She glared. “You don’t have to make it sound like I weigh five hundred pounds.”

No, she definitely didn’t weigh that. She was tall and muscular, probably a little self-conscious about her size, but he’d always liked a woman who didn’t look like she’d break in half in a strong wind—the way his mate had.

“Let’s go.” Roughly, he hauled her over his shoulder and leaped a fifteen-foot gully, landing feather-soft on a fallen log.

Nicole squeaked in surprise but wisely kept quiet as he forged his way through the wilderness. He used his ninety years combined of Army and vampire experience to leave minimal evidence of their passing, but he had to waste precious time making sure his blood didn’t leave a trail. They moved more slowly than he’d have liked, and by the time they reached the system of caves, his various minor cuts and scrapes had healed, but his lungs and ribs were screaming in agony.

He scaled a rocky ledge and slipped through a narrow cave entrance concealed by boulders and brush. Once inside the dark, dank cavern, he eased Nicole to the ground and caught her when she stumbled backward on wobbly legs.

“You okay?” An ugly bruise was spreading from her cheek to her temple. Frowning, he put his fingers to the swollen flesh around her eye, hoping nothing was broken.

She jerked away from him. “I’ll have a black eye soon, but it could have been worse.”

He dropped his hand, strangely offended by her reaction, even though he’d expected nothing else. “Yeah. You could have been poisoned with boric acid and then stabbed.”

Dead silence. She probably didn’t realize he could see her in the pitch blackness, and the sudden guilt in her expression was a surprise. Guess she didn’t think she’d be around to watch her victim die.

“Look,” she finally said. “What would you have done if someone had kidnapped you from your house, put you in a cell, and threatened to torture and kill you?”

“Do you even hear yourself? Humans have been doing that to vampires for decades.” He didn’t bother waiting for a reply.

He strode through the darkness as easily as if the place was wired for lights and pushed aside a recliner-sized rock that concealed a recess loaded with supplies. His arms shook with the effort, which had been far more work than he’d have liked. His injuries were draining him fast. Too fast.

“What are you doing?”

He lifted a burlap sack out of the hole and returned to Nicole, his gait faltering for the last couple of feet. Not good.

“We might be here for a little while.” He dug matches and candles from the bag and lit one. Nicole looked around the cavern, blinking as her eyes adjusted to the flickering light.

“You stay here often?”

“Let’s just say that we have a lot of hideouts.” He plucked a first-aid kit from the bag. “You never know when some asshole is going to try to poach or enslave you.”

She flushed. “I didn’t realize . . .” She trailed off, rubbing her arms.

“You didn’t realize what? That we live our lives looking over our shoulders? Or that we’re smart enough to be prepared when humans hunt us? Or that your precious humans aren’t always the good guys?” He tossed a blanket and a bottle of water at her and dug a roll of gauze out of the first-aid kit. “Don’t try anything stupid. The poachers are going to be swarming the area.”

“So we’re just going to sit here? For how long?”

“Until I say it’s safe or until I’m dead. Whichever comes first.” He shrugged out of his coat, trying to keep the pained winces at a minimum. “I don’t suppose there’s an antidote for the poison you gave me.”

“It’s available through our labs. If you can get me to the Norwalk research facility on the west side of Seattle—”

“You’ll save me?” He snorted. Which hurt. “I think
it’s more likely I’ll be captured and either experimented on or gelded, defanged, and turned into a slave. Probably yours.”

His fingers found the buckle to his weapons harness, but his right arm wasn’t working right. Pain speared him from his biceps to his knuckles with every movement, and to his utter humiliation, he kept fumbling the leather strap and the buckle. Finally, when his muscles turned to water, he dropped his hands, hating himself for admitting defeat.

Then Nicole shocked the shit out of him by leaning over to unbuckle the harness. Her strong, slender hands eased the straps from his shoulders, and his cheeks heated when she helped him out of his bloody T-shirt. He didn’t like that he needed her help, but he wasn’t so full of pride that he’d refuse it.

“I don’t have vampire servants,” she said quietly.

“Really.” She averted her gaze, and something occurred to him. “It’s not because you think slavery is wrong, is it? The reason you don’t have a slave is that you hate vampires so much.”

“I admit I don’t harbor any love for vampires.” She handed him the gauze he’d dug out of the first-aid kit. “But I’ve never supported slavery. Believe it or not, there are people trying to end vampire ownership.”

Vampire
ownership
. Sounded so . . . pleasant. He’d have laughed, but merely breathing was becoming an effort. “That’s a damned joke. Those groups want slavery to end, but they also want to make sure every vampire is either confined or destroyed. Slavery is wrong, but vampires are too dangerous to be loose in the world, isn’t that right?” He tore a strip of gauze off
the roll and packed his wound. Why was it still bleeding so badly? It should have been halfway healed by now. “But even those groups are few and far between. You humans love slavery.”