He wanted to run his mouth from her collarbone to her navel…
then have a go between her thighs.
Shit, he was getting hard again. And that was pretty damn useless. She'd satisfied her curiosity
with his body, so she wouldn't be up for throwing him a bone and relieving him again. And even
if she was attracted to him, she already had someone, didn't she. With a nasty growl he pictured
that dark-haired doctor type who was waiting for her back in her real life. The guy was of her
kind and no doubt wholly masculine as well.
The very idea of that bastard treating her right, not just during the day but between the sheets at
night, made his chest sting.
Shit.
V put his arm over his eyes and wondered exactly when he'd had a personality transplant.
Theoretically Jane had operated on his heart, not his head, but he hadn't been right since he'd
been on her table. Thing was, he just couldn't help but want her to see him as a mate-although
that was an impossibility for a whole host of reasons: He was a vampire who was a freak… and
he was going to become the Primale in a matter of days.
He thought about what was waiting for him on the Other Side, and even though he didn't want to
go into the past, he couldn't stop himself. He went back to what had been done to him, recalling
what had set the wheels in motion for the mauling that had left him half a male.
It was perhaps a week after his father burned his books that Vishous was caught coming out
from behind the screen that hid the cave paintings. His undoing was the diary of the warrior
Darius. He'd avoided his precious possession for days and days, but eventually he'd given in. His
hands had craved the weight of the binding, his eyes the sight of the words, his mind the images
it gave him, his heart the connection he found with the writer.
He was too alone to resist.
It was a kitchen whore who saw him, and they both froze when she did. He didn't know her
name, but she had the same face that all females had in the camp: hard eyes, lined skin, and a
slash of a mouth. There were bite marks layered on her neck from males feeding from her, and
her shift was dirty and frayed at the hem. In one hand she had a rough-hewn shovel, and behind
her she was dragging a wheelbarrow with a broken wheel. She'd obviously drawn the short
straw and been forced to tend to the privy pits.
Her eyes shifted down to V's hand as if she were measuring a weapon.
V deliberately made a fist with the thing. « 'Twould be a shame should you say a thing, would it
not.»
She paled and scurried off, dropping the shovel as she ran.
News of what had happened between him and the other pretrans had been all around the camp,
and if it made them fear him, that was all to the good. To protect his only book he wasn't above
threatening anyone, even females, and he was unashamed by this. His father's law held that no
one was safe in the camp: V was quite confident that female would use what she'd seen to her
own benefit if she could. That was the way.
Vishous left the cave through one of the tunnels that had been bored out of the mountain, and
emerged in a thicket of brambles. The winter was coming upon them all fast, the cold making the
air dense as bone. Up ahead he heard the stream rushing and wanted a drink, but he stayed
hidden as he scrambled up the pine covered incline. He always kept away from the water for a
distance after he came out, not just because it was what he'd been taught to do upon penalty of
punishment, but because in his pretrans state he was no match for what might come at him, be it
vampire, human, or animal.
At the beginning of every night, the pretrans tried to fill their empty bellies at the stream, and his
ears picked up the sounds of the other pretrans who were fishing. The boys had longregated at
the wide section of the stream, where the water formed a still pool off to one side. He avoided
them, choosing a spot farther upriver.
From out of a leather pouch he took a length of finespun thread that had a crude hook and a
flashing weight of silver tied on the end. He cast his meager tackle into the rushing water and
felt the string go tight. As he sat down on a
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