Dark Destiny (Dark Sentinel #1) - Lexxie Couper Page 0,19

every hospital, morgue and seedy twenty-four-hour pub he could, hoping to catch her distinct, unmistakable scent.

She wasn’t at any of them and nor had she been, not even the Tudor Hotel, inner Sydney’s most dangerous, high-mortality-rate pub, despite the fact a drunk Irish tourist had been stabbed in the neck and died during a brawl over a spilt bottle of Guinness no less than fifty minutes ago.

Wherever Death was, she wasn’t lending a hand to the expiration of the newly dead within a twenty-mile radius.

Meters from the hospital’s main exit, far enough away there was no one immediately close to him, he stopped and pulled in a deep breath, tasting the three-a.m. air. Hoping to detect even the faintest trace of the Grim Reaper.

The rich, cloying stench of blood filtered through his nose, over his highly tuned olfactory nerves. Damn it, he was still too close to the hospital.

Hot saliva flooded his mouth and his fangs extended from his gums, stabbing at his bottom lip. He snarled, forcing them to retract. Had he ever been this freaking hungry?

Nope.

Not since becoming a vampire.

His stomach growled, a wholly human physical reaction to denied sustenance.

“Fuck,” he muttered. This wouldn’t do. He’d need all his strength when he found Death and unless he fed soon, he’d be weaker than an asthmatic kindergartener. The savage memory of how easily she’d tossed him aside in Patrick’s bedroom still haunted him.

Blood. He needed blood.

He pulled his mobile from his back pocket, woke it up with a swipe of his thumb and then shoved it back into his pocket. Amy would be more than willing to accommodate his hunger right at that moment, but what he needed was a quick, sharp, impersonal, no-questions-asked feed.

In and out in less than ten minutes.

When he fed from Amy, it was never quick. Or impersonal.

Which meant he had two options.

One—he could “charm” his way into the local cop shop and take his pick of any of the scum incarcerated in lock-up. Or two—he could hit the Pleasure Palace Nightclub on Kings Cross’s main drag and take his pick of any of the willing humans there eager to give their body/blood/sex to one of Sydney’s underground “creatures”.

His saliva glands exploded again at the carnal thought.

Pleasure Palace it was.

Grunting from frustrated impatience—he really didn’t have time for this—he sprinted into the shadows of the hospital’s dimly lit car park and folded space.

There really was no other way to describe the process by which he moved around when in a hurry. He thought of where he wanted to be, pictured it in his mind, pictured an impossible fold in reality bringing his current location and his desired location together and then—with a blurring of his surroundings and a white-hot surge of energy through his body—he was there.

He knew he physically traveled the distance between the two spots, but how still eluded him. Sometimes, after arriving at his desired location, he recalled the night air kissing his face as the lights of the city streaked beneath him. He never questioned how he could possibly be flying, and the speed at which he moved. What mattered was that he got where he wanted to, fast.

The ability to do so had saved Patrick’s life more than once from some unexplained “accident”.

And hopefully it would again tonight if he could locate the Grim bloody Reaper, although he had to admit, Death in the flesh could never be called an accident.

A vivid and all-too-clear image of Death in the flesh popped uninvited into Ven’s head. A dark tension coiled through the pit of his stomach and a twinge of unexpected hunger shot through his body.

What would it be like to feed from the Grim Reaper? Could he? What would her blood taste like? As delicious as human blood? Or better?

He growled. He most definitely didn’t have time for that kind of fantasy. Besides, the bitch had taken his soul. What the bloody hell was he doing thinking of feeding on her?

Forcing the way-too-enticing notion of Death’s flesh pierced by his fangs from his mind, he replaced it with an image of the filthy but hardly used alley behind the Pleasure Palace Nightclub.

His cold skin began to tingle, his blood began to burn.

He pictured the hospital car park and the alley coming together, like a piece of paper being folded in two. He drew the image into his mind and then he moved through existence, his hair rippling back from his temples and forehead, lashing behind him as he ripped through