had come next. Funny, the turn in the road you anticipated
was never the one with the black ice on it. He'd assumed that the other pretrans would drive him
out of the camp, that one by one they would go through their change, then gang up on him. But
fate liked surprises, didn't it.
He rolled on his side and became determined to get some sleep. Except as the door to the
bathroom opened, he had to crack an eyelid. Jane had changed into a white button-down shirt
and a pair of loose black yoga sweats. Her face was flushed from the heat of her shower, her hair
spiky and damp. She looked amazing.
She glanced over at him briefly, a quick cursory review that told him she assumed he was asleep;
then she went over and sat in the chair in the corner. As she drew her legs up, she wrapped her
arms around her knees and lowered her chin. She seemed so fragile that way, just a twist of flesh
and bone within the embrace of the chair.
He shut his eye and felt wretched. His conscience, which had been all but unplugged for
centuries, was awake and aching: He couldn't pretend he wasn't going to be fully healed in
another six hours. Which meant her purpose was over and he was going to have to let her go
when the sun went down tonight.
Except what about the vision he'd had of her? The one of her standing in the doorway of light?
Ah, hell, maybe he'd just been hallucinating??/p>
V frowned as he caught a scent in the room. What the hell?
Inhaling deeply, he hardened in a rush, his cock thickening, growing heavy on his belly. He
looked across the room at Jane. Her eyes were closed, her mouth a little open, her brows down??/p>
and she was aroused. She might not have felt entirely comfortable with it, but she was definitely
aroused. Was she thinking of him? Or the human male?
V reached out with his mind with no real hope of getting into her head. When his visions had
dried up, so too had the running tickertape of other people's thoughts, the one that could be
forced on him or picked up at his will-
The vision in her mind was of him.
Oh, fuck, yeah. It was so totally him: He was arching on the bed, his stomach muscles tightening,
his hips pushing up as she worked his sex with her palm. This was right before he came, when
he'd removed his gloved hand from what was doing below his cock and made a grab for the
duvet.
His surgeon wanted him even though he was partially ruined and not her kind and holding her
against her will. And she was aching. She was aching for him.
V smiled as his fangs punched out into his mouth. Well, wasn't this the time to be a
humanitarian. And relieve some of her suffering??/p>
Shitkickers planted in a wide stance, fists curled at his side, Phury stood over the lesser he'd just
knocked stupid with a nasty shot to the temple. The bastard was lying facedown in a dirty slush
pile, its arms and legs flopped to the side, its leather jacket torn up the back from the fighting.
Phury took a deep breath. There was a gentlemanly way to kill your enemy. In the midst of war,
there was an honorable manner to bring death upon even those you hated.
He looked up and down the alley and sniffed the air. No humans. No other lessers. And none of
his brothers.
He bent down to the slayer. Yeah, when you took out your enemies, there was a certain standard
of conduct to be upheld.
This was not going to be it.
Phury picked the lesser up by its leather belt and its pale hair and swung the thing headfirst into a
brick building like a battering ram. A muffled, meaty thunch lit out as the frontal lobe shattered
and the spinal column pierced through the back of the skull.
But the thing was not dead. To kill a slayer you needed to stab him in the chest. If left as it was
now, the bastard would just be in a perpetual rotting state until the Omega eventually came back
for the body.
Phury dragged the thing by an arm behind a Dumpster and took out a dagger. He didn't use it the
weapon to stab the slayer back to its master. His anger, that emotion he didn't like to feel, that
force that he didn't permit to attach to people or events, had started to roar. And its impulse was
undeniable.
The cruelty of his actions stained his conscience. Even though his victim was an amoral killer
who
| | |
|