Reaper's Dark Kiss
Read Reaper's Dark Kiss Online
Authors: Ryssa Edwards
| Reaper's Dark Kiss |
| Ryssa Edwards |
| Loose Id LLC (2014) |
SkyLynne Jordan is a tough, street-savvy reporter for an online journal. She’s interviewed drug lords and assassins—and lived. But Julian, the tall, dark and slightly frightening stranger who shows up in Central Park when she’s stalking the mysterious Fang Killer, is like nobody she’s ever met before. It’s not so much his warning that the killer is too much for her Taser as the way this man’s very presence sends a jolt of lust through her demanding, “Take him!”
Julian has spent millennia as a Shadow World Reaper, standing against vampire rogues to protect humans from destruction. His kind mate for life, and his heightened senses tell him that Sky is his forever mate. Her body haunts his dreams. Making Sky his mate drives Julian to take risks he’s never taken, and in the end he’ll battle the worst of the worst for the woman he's grown to love.
Loose Id Titles by Ryssa Edwards
REAPER’S DARK KISS
Ryssa Edwards
www.loose-id.com
Reaper’s Dark Kiss
Copyright © February 2014 by Ryssa Edwards
All rights reserved. This copy is intended for the original purchaser of this e-book ONLY. No part of this e-book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without prior written permission from Loose Id LLC. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author's rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
Image/art disclaimer: Licensed material is being used for illustrative purposes only. Any person depicted in the licensed material is a model.
eISBN 9781623006471
Editor: Rory Olsen
Cover Artist: April Martinez
Published in the United States of America
Loose Id LLC
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San Francisco CA 94104-0809
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This e-book is a work of fiction. While reference might be made to actual historical events or existing locations, the names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Warning
This e-book contains sexually explicit scenes and adult language and may be considered offensive to some readers. Loose Id LLC’s e-books are for sale to adults ONLY, as defined by the laws of the country in which you made your purchase. Please store your files wisely, where they cannot be accessed by under-aged readers.
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Dedication
This book is dedicated to my sister, whose encouragement has been unfailing.
Acknowledgment
This work would not have been possible without the works of Bram Stoker.
Chapter One
If Julian’s brothers ever heard about this, he’d spend centuries living it down.
He carried out death scrolls. He hunted his own kind, executed them mercilessly. He was a Shadow World reaper. And where was he tonight? Behind a tree, hiding from a mortal female.
She stopped at the end of a wooded path just feet away. He willed her to move on, to go do whatever errand had lured her into a killing ground. She didn’t. Cautious, she perched on a bench beside the path and opened a small backpack.
Inside Julian, his beast woke, aroused by the sight of her in moonlight. Soft hair, curly to her shoulders, thin nose, high cheekbones. Lips that were a seduction.
For a second Julian couldn’t believe what he saw. She’d pulled out a tablet, stroked the screen to life, and now she was settling down to type.
In Central Park? At two in the morning?
He couldn’t ambush the vampire he’d come after if she sat there all night blogging. She had to leave. He’d frighten her if that was what it took. Crunching over stone, he made his way toward the bench. Even though Julian knew she heard him, she kept typing. The giveaway was her heartbeat. It was too fast.
“You should go find a diner to write at. It’s healthier,” he said, coming to a halt in front of her.
A blast of adrenaline filled the air between them. Her body went tense. Her hammering heart told Julian she was on the edge of fight or flight. At less than half his size, there was no way she was thinking of fighting. And she couldn’t run, because he was between her and the path. Even with all that, she sounded calm when she looked up at him and said, “Healthier? You ever eat in a diner? They’re heart attacks waiting to happen.”
“Maybe,” Julian said, “but sitting here in the middle of the night is a good way to get dead quick instead of slow.”
The mortal’s heartbeat spiked to quick staccato rhythm. Whoever she was, she knew how to stand her ground when everything about Julian told her to run or die. She fixed him with a cool stare. Her eyes were silvery gray, the color of a hazy sky. “You know a lot about killing?”
“I know enough.”
The scent of her adrenaline faded. Her instincts were sharp. She suddenly knew Julian wasn’t there to kill her. With a sigh she said, “You’re not him.” She laid the tablet aside, got to her feet, and offered him a hand. “Sky Jordan,” she said, “investigative reporter for
Gritty Streets
, online journal.”
This was trouble he could do without.
Julian took her hand. It was warm, soft, and bone-dry. Sky Jordan had the guts of a centurion. “Julian.” He scanned the darkness. “What if I’d been—”
“The Fang Killer?” she said, excitement edging out fear in her voice.
“Let’s just say.”
Her hands disappeared. Then they were in Julian’s face with two tiny red spray cans. “Mace,” she said, shaking them. She dropped the cans, then whipped a slim rectangle from the small of her back. “Taser.”
News stories of the Fang Killings had drawn mortals with more curiosity than common sense to the park deep into the night. Rogue vampires found them, fed on them, and left them weak, easy prey to mortal predators. Sky’s Mace and Taser would have made a stalking vampire angry enough to rip out her throat. But Julian couldn’t say that. “Too slow,” he said. “You’d be dead.”
Sky bent to pick up the cans. “Sounds like you know something about what’s been going on.”
Julian breathed in her mixed scent of fear and excitement. His beast snarled an animal demand for sex. Even after millennia in this world, the feel of raw desire hit him like a body slam and left him reeling. His mating scent rose in the night like mist. Doing his best to ignore what he was feeling, he said, “I don’t know what kinds of stories you write, but you need to be gone from this park, right now.”
She met his gaze, a response poised on her lips, but a confused expression crossed her face. A light blush touched her cheeks. It was impossible, but she was responding to his mating scent. He felt her gaze on his tall, muscled body and kept a smile from his lips, waiting for her to speak.
“Why should I leave?” Sky pretended she felt nothing, but the sudden scent of arousal made a liar of her. “It’s a nice night, full moon.”
It would be easy for Julian to get Sky out of the way, if he was willing to gag her so she couldn’t scream when he threw her over his shoulder and hiked her to the park entrance. Then he’d be the biggest story on
Gritty Streets
. He couldn’t have that. When a reaper couldn’t win, he waited. “You’re right,” he said in an even voice. “It’s nice out.” He sat on the back of the bench, his feet on the seat, hands hanging relaxed between his legs. Sitting like that, his knives were in easy reach. “Let’s stay awhile.”
A subtle change in Sky’s heartbeat told Julian he’d caught her off guard. She settled onto the bench, got her tablet, and started typing again. “What are you doing out here?” she asked, her fingers not slowing.
“It’s a park,” he said, telling the quickest lie he could think of. “I came to see the flowers.”
She gave him a look that said he was either stupid or dangerous, but she said nothing. Julian let her fall into concentrated silence and watched her peck at her on-screen keyboard. She was close enough for her body heat to seep into him. That made him wonder what she would feel like against him, naked, after they’d made love and he was drunk on the taste of her kisses. Julian smiled to himself. He enjoyed some parts of being captive to a human form.
What was wrong with him? He was on a mission, one that was taking too damn long.
Most mortals didn’t know that Shades—what their legends called vampires—lived side by side with them, hidden from a sun that would burn them to ash. That was why the mortals being dumped in the park, drained of blood, were a big problem. A drainer so far gone he used a park as an aboveground cemetery was like taking out a billboard ad in Times Square that said GOT VAMPIRES?
The council had sent Julian. In the past, they had turned blind eyes to how Julian carried out his death-scroll executions. But they wouldn’t this time. A bad kill could start a war between Dominion vampires and the Creed. Mortals would be caught in the middle. Julian’s directive was to witness the drainer in the act so that his brother Marek, Lord of the Creed, could petition the council for a death scroll.
He glanced at the horizon. Sunrise was about an hour too near. Julian had to head for shelter, away from the coming light. But he wasn’t leaving Sky here alone.
“If you let me walk you home before dawn,” he said, “I’ll answer one question about the Fang Killer.”
“One question?” She gave him a thoughtful look. “All right,” she said. “I can come back tomorrow night.”
“No,” Julian said before he could catch himself.
“How would you stop me?” Sky asked.
He couldn’t. “I’ll think up a better offer on the way,” he said. “But we leave now, and you call me before you come back out here.”
She stood and stretched. Lithe muscles flexed under her long-sleeve navy-blue jersey. “I don’t have your number.”
Julian gestured for the tiny notebook and pencil he’d seen sticking out of the back pocket of her jeans. When she gave it to him, he wrote down his number and handed it back. “Let’s go,” he said.