Her brows lifted. Her amber eyes chal enged him—the distinctive irises of a vampire. One who could move among the others with ease, but who was stil frail in many ways. His Sentinel blood would protect her from the il ness, and she knew how to fight and wouldn’t hesitate to kil , but she’d stil be vulnerable and he wouldn’t be close enough to protect her. And there was the fact that while most minions would have no idea who she was, some of the Fal en did because of Syre and Shadoe. She wasn’t total y anonymous.
He couldn’t risk her, couldn’t lose her. “No,” he said again, pushing the negation into her mind for emphasis.
“Stay out of my head, angel,” she growled.
Siobhán’s melodious voice floated out of the phone’s speaker. “I’m also going to need more lycan blood.”
“Not a problem.” He had plenty cryogenical y stored, for identification and genetic testing purposes. “Anything else?”
“Perhaps…” She hesitated a moment. “Perhaps other angelic blood samples. From a mal’akh or even an archangel. Preferably both. Perhaps we Sentinels aren’t the only ones who carry the cure in our veins.”
“You don’t ask for much, do you?” Adrian said drily. Even though malakhim—the lowest rank of angel in the lowest sphere—were the most numerous, getting blood from one was no easy task. “I’l see what I can do. Keep me posted.”
“Yes, Captain. Of course.”
He hung up, his gaze never leaving Lindsay’s face. She was careful not to openly chal enge him in front of his subordinates, a circumspection she’d always displayed and he had always appreciated. But she’d chal enge him in private. He would never tel her how much it aroused him when she did so. He’d just continue to show her instead… “We need a plan B, Lindsay. Work on coming up with that.”
Elijah shoved both hands through his hair, his heart pounding violently, his gaze on the woman sprawled prone on the bed. Vashti’s hair was a crimson cloud around her, the glossy strands lying sinuously atop her back and shoulders. Her face was turned toward him, her lips parted with her panting exhalations. Her clawed hands fisted the fitted sheet, and trails of tears were stil visible on her pale cheeks. Not due to him, but to the nightmare she’d suffered that had woken him.
No…please…stop… Over and over in a broken litany. Whimpers and gasps of pain. Moans of agony that ripped through his vitals.
He would never forget the bloodcurdling scream that had sent him leaping from the bed as a man but landing on the floor in his lupine form.
Without his wil . His beast had bypassed his control for the first time ever. For her. Because she’d cried out in distress, struggling through the throes of a nightmare.
And he’d been unable to shift back until the beast was certain she was al right. He’d paced the room, sniffing along the cracks around the door and in the corners, growling because there was no other outlet for his helpless fury but to search and find nothing to kil . Once he’d been assured that nothing in the locked room posed a threat to her, he’d padded over to the bed. He had nuzzled against the crown of her head and licked away her tears. She’d calmed then, settling back into a fitful sleep. Only then had he been capable of shifting back.
Everyone was wrong about him—he was no Alpha or he would never have shifted without conscious thought. Which meant they needed to find one who was. Quickly.
In the meantime, he was crazily attuned to Vashti. To the extreme. Their primal mating had brought on more than explosive orgasms. It had altered him and his reactions to her, eroding his control along with his goddamn common sense. He could hardly recognize himself this morning.
What the f**k was the matter with him?
He was afraid he knew. Those endless moments when he’d been bound and captured beneath her, helpless to stop her as she took his blood and his se**n into her mouth, riveted by the burn of fury and ferocious desire as she sheathed his aching c**k in her tight, hot depths…they’d shifted him on the inside. And when he had taken over and she’d shattered beneath him, he had accepted the surrender of such a powerful and lethal woman with a possessive surge of awe and gratitude.
Someone’s fist pounded against the door, and Elijah yanked it open, scowling at the interruption of Vashti’s rest.
“What do you want?” he snapped at Salem, who sucked up al the space in the hal way. Elijah didn’t give a shit that he was bare-assed naked.
Neither did the vamp.
“Have you seen Vashti?” Salem barked back. Then his nose twitched as he scented the air. His eyes widened as he comprehended just how thoroughly Elijah had seen her.
“Yeah. Go away.”
“Where’d she go?”
“She’s sleeping. Come back later.” Elijah backed up and shut the door.
Salem stopped the latch from catching with a slap of his palm against the metal. “Sleeping?”
“You know. Eyes closed. Lack of consciousness. Sound familiar? Go away.”
Salem pushed to widen the opening. “Move aside, lycan.”
Bored with the conversation and stil aggravated by Vash’s nightmare, Elijah stepped out to the hal way and shut the door careful y behind him.
Then he shoved the vampire across the hal and into the opposite doorway, which Salem busted through to slide into the foot of a heavily occupied bed. Elijah got a glimpse of enough bare limbs and arched necks to make up at least four bodies.