“If you’d been able to take her down, yes. She’s a damned fine warrior, armed or not.”
Vash flipped the phone back around to face her. “How did you get your hands on Lindsay?”
The hair on Elijah’s arms and nape rose with his sudden fury. He’d pinned the vampress to a tree by the throat before she knew what’d hit her.
Vash found herself flattened into the coarse bark of a tree trunk by over six feet and two hundred twenty pounds of bristling, growling lycan. Her fury over being caught unawares was exacerbated by her prickling dislike of Elijah’s proprietary feelings toward Lindsay Gibson.
“What?” she taunted, catching the wrists of his hands presently wrapped around her neck. His heavily muscled thigh was shoved between hers and his lean hips pressed against her pelvis in a way that set her heart racing. “Got a hard-on for Adrian’s woman?”
“Where is she?”
Her smile was mocking. “Why do you care?”
“Lindsay saved my life.”
“I knew I hated that bitch for a reason.”
“She’s with Adrian.”
Elijah’s head turned toward the iPhone on the ground and Syre’s steely-eyed visage. “Is she unharmed?”
“If she’s stil alive, she’s healthier than she’s ever been.”
A chil slid down Elijah’s spine. He looked at Vashti, whose eyes were bright with chal enge. While a mortal would have lost consciousness by now from lack of air, the vampress was merely flushed, which made her even more beautiful. “What did you do to her?”
“What she wanted done,” Syre answered. “Release my second, Alpha, before I decide you’re more trouble than you’re worth.”
“Not yet.” Maybe not ever, if his growing suspicions were realized. His gut knotted as the fear deepened.
Vash smiled. “How did you get her, Syre?”
“She was brought to me by members of the Anaheim cabal.”
Elijah growled. “There’s a vampire nest in Southern California?”
“We prefer to cal them cabals or covens,” she corrected, “depending on the size.” She turned her gaze to Syre. “Did they tel you how they got her out of Angels’ Point?”
It was no secret that Angels’ Point, Adrian’s compound in Anaheim Hil s, was a fortress. Set high above the city, it was guarded by Sentinels and lycans—before the revolt—as wel as the finest electronic surveil ance mil ions could buy.
“No.” The turning wheels in Syre’s mind were evident in his contemplative tone. “I assumed they’d acquired her somewhere between her work and the Point.”
“We need to talk to them. They have a winged contact they’re not sharing.”
“I’l see to it. And I’ve sent the Alpha’s blood sample from the scene of Nikki’s abduction out to be analyzed for anticoagulants, as you requested.
I’l let you know the results when I have them.” There was a pause. “Are you al right there, Vashti?”
The circle of her fingers released Elijah’s wrists, freeing her hands to slide up his arms like a lover. Teasing him. Goading him. “Of course.”
“Check in regularly, so I can be certain.”
“Yes, Syre.”
Yes, Syre. Elijah was determined to hear her cede to him as thoroughly…while she was beneath him, taking hard, deep thrusts of his aching cock. That he could want her and want to kil her at the same time was f**king with his head. Rachel’s pain was a vice around his chest…Lindsay had lost her mother to Vashti’s viciousness…yet stil he craved the vampress with a ferocity that shook him.
She squeezed his shoulders with a vampire’s strength, which just happened to be the exact pressure he most enjoyed. Her hands ran down either side of his spine, kneading, before reaching his ass and palming it. Her tongue peeped out and slid over her ful lower lip. “You can’t have Lindsay, you know. She’s brain-dead over Adrian. Gave up her life for him.”
He fought the seductive lure she was trying to wrap him with. “What—exactly—did you do to her, Vashti?”