Eternal Beast: Mark of the Vampire (2 page)

True Mate
—The one each Pureblood
veana
and
paven
is destined for. Each shares an identical or complementary mark somewhere on their skin.

Veana
—A vampire female of pure blood.

Veracou
—The mating ceremony between two Pureblood vampires.

Virgini
—Virgin.

Witte
—Animal.

T
he private hospital located deep in the Maine woods was scented of antiseptic and bodily decay, despite the lack of patients residing in it.

Gray Donohue moved down the brightly lit hallway, his gaze ripping right and left as he took in each empty room, each perfectly made-up bed. Gray despised hospitals. And shit, after spending most of his life in them, nearly comatose and habitually restrained “for his own protection,” it was little wonder. But this was no long-term stay he was walking into. This was just a visit—a quick trip down memory lane that would end in a very satisfying prize.

Gray spotted a maintenance worker exiting one of the rooms up ahead. Battling with an ancient mop bucket and wringer, the balding, middle-aged male came to a screeching halt when he saw Gray, his pale, watery eyes going wide, his mind kicking up a curse and a query.

“Oh, shit. What’s this guy doing in here?”

Without another glance, Gray moved on, down the hall and toward his true goal.

But the foolish human decided to run after him.

“I’m sorry, sir,” the man said, his heavy breathing suggesting his unease. “You can’t go any farther. The hallway up ahead is being cleaned.”

Gray didn’t slow.

“Sir! Please!”

In the back of his mind, Gray heard the male’s rapid-fire plans to call security. With a quick turn, he snatched him up and squeezed just enough breath from his wriggling body to knock him out. Then, after depositing him in one of the many empty rooms, Gray continued on. There was nothing, no one who would stop him from getting what he needed.

After rounding one corner, then another, he headed straight for the door at the end of the hall. Room 482. He hoped his spies were right about this one. After three false starts at three other care facilities over the past five months, his patience had grown thin.

As expected, a guard stood before the door. The male was tall, dark, and massive. In fact, he looked a hell of a lot like the Impure warrior Vincent, one of Gray’s partners in the Resistance—the rogue band of four who were hell-bent on bringing equality to the Eternal Breed—but Gray was willing to bet this male carried no in-mouth bloodsucking hardware and was all human.

As Gray approached, the guard narrowed his black eyes and put up a meaty hand.
“What do you think you’re doing, asshole?”
his mind growled. But aloud, he spoke
in a calm voice. “Don’t know how you got in here, but do yourself a favor and turn back around and walk out again.”

Gray had no doubt that in a few minutes there would be more robo cops just like this one to contend with. He’d better be quick. Get in, take what he needed, and get out. Loss of life was always possible on these missions, but he didn’t like it, didn’t have a taste for it like the second male warrior in the Resistance, Rio. That ex-military Impure loved nothing better than to extinguish a heartbeat.

Gray was nearly to the door when the security guard pulled his gun. “Okay, buddy, I warned you. Take another step and you’ll be on your—”

Before the man finished his threat, Gray reached out, snatched the gun, flipped it, and slammed the butt into the guard’s head. Then, without missing a beat, he moved past him and opened the door.

No, he didn’t have a taste for violence, but anyone guarding his prize was part of the Order’s campaign to blood castrate Impures—and that was something Gray would kill for.

The room was large, achingly white and cold—as though the male lying on the hospital bed against the wall needed to be kept fresh. To Gray, the big bad senator from Maine looked anything but big and bad. His eyes were closed, his wrinkles deep-set, and his skin was frog-belly white. He was stretched out on the bed, his limbs locked in place by straps Gray remembered all too well. His muscles twitched beneath his skin as he moved to the side of the bed.

Get in, get out, Impure,
Gray reminded himself as he
stood over the male and whispered a terse, “Open your eyes, Senator.”

The man didn’t move, didn’t even flinch—but his mind came alive in a fit of alarm.

“Just lie still. Don’t move. He’ll go away
.”

A touch of a grin hit Gray’s mouth. When Alexander Roman had unclogged his muddled brain so many months ago and left him with not only the knowledge that he was half vampire but with the gift of hearing the thoughts of others, he hadn’t been all that thrilled. In fact, the onslaught of voices had nearly driven him mad. But in moments like this, he felt a deep surge of pleasure for his mental abilities.

He leaned down and whispered, “I’m not going anywhere, Senator. Not yet.”

“Oh God
.”

The male’s lids flickered.

“All the way open now,” Gray instructed with deadly calm. “Or I cut the lids off with this very dull knife at my back. I suppose I should’ve sharpened it before coming. But what fun would that be, right?”

A gasp shot from the senator’s throat, and his eyes opened and bulged like a fish. He stared up into Gray’s face with undisguised terror.

“You’ve been very difficult to find, Senator,” Gray said. “Even your wife has no idea where you are.”

The male’s lip quivered.

“They swore no one would find me
.”

Gray narrowed his eyes. “Who?”

The man’s eyes widened further.

“Who swore no one would find you?” Gray repeated, moving another inch closer to the male’s face.

Gray could sense the man’s heart jumping, beating rapidly in his chest as his mind screamed the impossible truth.
“He heard me. Heard my thoughts
.”

“Was it the Order?” Gray continued, undaunted.

“The Order. The vampires
.”

A growl of pleasure, of potential gain escaped Gray’s throat. The lawmakers, the overlords, the elitist rulers of the Eternal Breed had indeed cloistered and used this human. “I want to know how you’ve been communicating with them. How do you call them? How do you receive their messages?”

The senator shook his head against the onslaught of questions.

Gray growled low in his throat. “You think
they
are something to fear? Then you don’t understand what stands before you, human.”

The senator’s weak bladder released then, and Gray cursed. He needed to get this information and get out of here. It was hard enough standing over this man—this piece of shit who had been responsible for Dillon’s beating. He wanted to slice him in half and leave him to bleed out as he screamed for help that would come too late. But he wasn’t after revenge tonight. Tonight he wanted inside the male’s blood, wanted to find his access into the Order’s communication mainframe, their mental link with Purebloods, Impures, humans, and one another. He wanted inside the brain of the entire telepathic system, and if what the Impure male inmate at the vampire prison Mondrar had told Gray was true, this nearly dead fish lying before him was their conduit.

In the many months since the Resistance’s inception,
Gray had found his calling, his purpose. After nearly being blood castrated, he’d joined with three other Impures to form a mental powerhouse. Now they were close to being able to hack into the Order’s telepathic mainframe. If they could hijack that mainframe, they were pretty certain they could remain, intercept the messages to the Impures and send out their own, gather secret information to use as currency—perhaps even shut down the entire operation, if all else failed and the Order refused their call for freedom.

Below Gray, the senator shifted almost desperately, his eyes filling with tears.

“Please don’t hurt me. Please
.”

Gray’s lip curled. What a coward. He would see this man suffer, but not yet, not tonight. The Impure Resistance would need him longer.

He leaned in close. “I’ll give you five seconds to tell me how you communicate with the Order and then I’m going in.”

The male tried to scream, tried to open his mouth, but he couldn’t. The Order had made it impossible for him to speak lies, truth, or anything in between, Gray realized. They had fused his lips together.

Christ
.

Gray flashed his fangs, bent his head, and struck. He heard the senator’s cry of pain and terror but shoved it away. This was his third blood memory grab in two weeks, and it was painful and fucked with his brain. But each one had gleaned him some important intel, not to mention made him a stronger mental force. Each member of the Impure Resistance was mentally at the top of his game and needed to stay that way to
defeat the Order and take their first step toward self-rule.

Gray moved swiftly through the senator’s mind, shuffling, sifting through memories to find the ones he needed. Any and all that connected him with the Order. Experience had made him shrewd, and it took him only a minute or two to find, gather, and file away what he needed. He was about to pull out when one memory, one dark and ugly scene, grabbed his mind and had him skidding to a halt.

Night, an abandoned lot, a few cars dotting the asphalt landscape, and a female—a
veana
, her expression pissed off, her face knocked around and bloody. The senator had thrown the first punch, but the cowardly piece of shit had stood back for the rest, watching with amusement and vindictive pleasure as several massive human males finished what he’d started.

Dillon.

Gray’s pulse slammed against the skin of his wrists and neck as he watched the
veana
try to fight off her attackers. She was like a wildcat, filled with fury, hunger, and terror, but she was only one being. She was strong and a Pureblood vampire, but she was no match for that many males. She went down hard, and as the surrounding bastard males pummeled her with fists and with feet, Gray saw her change. One moment she was female; the next she was something else altogether. Something strange, cat and female mixed.

Gray thought later that maybe if he’d pulled out of the senator right then and there, the male would’ve gone on breathing another day. But he didn’t. And what he heard next, saw next, sent him so far and so
deeply into rage that he no longer cared about the Resistance or his future with them.

“Forget the face and tend to the body,” said the senator from the safety of the sidelines. “Make that thing bleed. Make it incapable of breeding. Make it never want to fuck another thing for as long as it lives—make it always remember what happens when you say no to me.”

Gray got as far as the first steel-tipped boot into Dillon’s cheek when he snapped, pulled out of the man’s temple in a rush and used his fangs like twin daggers across the senator’s neck.

M
ost cats despised the water.

But not the jaguar. Not Dillon the jaguar.

No, this was her salvation, her baptism. She was pure predator now, deeply integrated into the world of the animal for as long as it took her to claim her prey once and for all.

Rain pounded the black earth, her massive paws striking puddle after puddle as she ran at top speed through the Green Mountain region of Southern Vermont. She’d crossed the New York border thirty minutes ago, escaping the protective custody of the Romans, her
mutore
brothers, and the Impure male who had found and delivered her to safety for the last time—or so he’d said. She growled into the wet night. Didn’t they understand? Didn’t they all get it? She wasn’t the one who needed protecting. It was the human who had sent her into this everlasting shift, the one who still breathed. He was the one in need of care.

Bounding out of the woods, she slowed just a hair as she came upon a children’s playground. It was deep in the dark of night, and the shadows protected her golden fur and black rosettes from the curious gaze of any nocturnal humans who might be about. As she passed a merry-go-round that creaked a slow rotation in the wind, her belly clenched. She was hungry, for blood and for meat, but a true meal would have to wait. A cat must have its chase, its attack, its kill before it feasted, and there was no time for that now. Later. Much later. But when it did come, she vowed, it would be a celebratory feed. One that—if she got it right—would commemorate not only the death of the human senator who’d had her beaten, but the days and weeks and endless, restless, merciless nights she’d suffered ever since, trying to gain control over her shift from
veana
to Beast.

Granted, she didn’t know where they were hiding this prey, this gutless human whom she’d worked for as a bodyguard for so many years. They’d moved him several times over the past six months. But she believed he was still somewhere in Maine, and she knew his scent.

Creeping under the overpass, where cars moved along at the frantic pace her cat’s lithe body understood and craved, Dillon headed for another stretch of woods. By tomorrow, she’d be in Maine, where she knew the scents of every street, every brick—and if she was lucky, one very arrogant dick.

A car’s headlights moved over her hips and tail just as she ducked into a patch of bracken, then darted off toward the woods again. Within minutes, she had the
scent of a rabbit on the roof of her mouth, and, though her fangs hummed with the need for it, she pushed forward. She had to get to her human prey. She had to end his life—because only then could she live again. The rain continued to fall in heavy sheets, but she ran, mile after mile, focused and unfazed, all the way from the Green Mountains to Eastern Vermont, all the way until her feet were so caked in mud she was forced to slow—all the way until an aching thirst compelled her to stop. She hated stopping. When she stopped or slowed, she started to think. Maybe not think exactly, but feel—which was far more dangerous. Feeling made a body weak and foolish and vulnerable. It led to hope and a feral need to connect. It led to pain and potential ruin. In her vampire form, she wasn’t as susceptible to it, but in her cat form, the need for connection, for the stroke of a kind, solid hand was, at times, unbearably strong.