It was like being stabbed and cradled in equal measure.
Pleasure and pain.
His hunger?
It was absent.
Except…
The lust unfurled like a slow moving avalanche that gained force and speed as it rolled downward to me.
“I wasn’t asking,” Rogue finished his sentence, and then the air whistled past us. I had to hold on for dear life and even managed to get my legs around his hips. He never so much as let me slip, but the wind hitting my back cut at me.
It must have sliced my shirt half to ribbons, or maybe that was my flesh. I barely had time to process Maddox’s furious expression or Fin’s shocked one before they were gone.
The race through the night seemed to stretch into infinity. Time ceased to have real meaning, and if not for the definitive squeeze of Rogue’s hand to my ass, I might have written this off as a bad dream.
Nightmares. I had been known to have them.
I’d been stuck in one for weeks now. They even called it Nightmare Penitentiary.
The sudden stop would have cracked my neck, but Rogue had a hand against my hair. My gratitude for the thoughtfulness died a swift death when he pulled the hand away and my hair clung to the bloody debris decorating his fingers.
Yeah.
Gross.
Stomach lurching, I swallowed back the bile as the raw coppery scents from too many different bodies hit me at once. Troll. Shifter. Pretty sure a couple were vampires, too. And at least four or five others that I didn’t know and really didn’t want to know.
Instead of putting me down, Rogue pinned me to a wall and leaned his hips into mine. There was no heavy cock shoving its way at me, so that wasn’t what he wanted.
Good—
The thought stuttered as he sliced at his throat just above where his neck joined his shoulder. Ancient blood slid out of the wound, fresh, hot, and so pungently sweet and savory, my mouth watered.
“Feed, little sváss.” The order settled into my bones, and unlike Maddox or Fin, I wanted to obey this one even if a small part of me continued to rebel. I didn’t even know this guy.
“I’m not a vampire,” I argued.
“I don’t care,” he retaliated, and then cupped my head and pulled my mouth to the injury.
Yeah, that argument wasn’t really working for me either.
The first brush of his blood to my lips, and I latched on without a second thought. Decadence exploded across my tongue, and I closed my eyes as a throaty moan vibrated in my throat.
Sinking my teeth into the wound, I worked it wider, and then it took active sucking to pull more blood from him. I applied myself, because I wanted more. Tightening my thighs against his hips, he rewarded every pull with a grind against me, and where he’d been lacking an erection before, one nudged at me now.
More, the crater of lust simmering beneath the surface cracked wide open, and then it swallowed me hole.
Fuck.
Me.
Maybe there was something to this vampire schtick.
Chapter 7
“‘I don’t believe in magic,’ the young boy said. The old man smiled. ‘You will when you see her.’” - Atticus
Fin
“Droch chrích ort.” Fin glared at the gaping hole in the wall through which Rogue vanished with their prize.
Maddox kicked a body away from him as he followed Fin’s stare, then scowled at Fin.
“It’s not my fault,” Fin argued.
“No?” Maddox half-growled, half-rumbled. “Whose idea was it to bring him into the middle of this?”
“I stand by that idea.” With a wave of his hand to the stacks of bodies around him, Fin paused, then pulled a handkerchief out of his inner pocket and began to clean the blood from his fingers as they made their way out. “It worked, didn’t it?”
For his part, the surly dragon just grunted. “Where did he take her?”
Concentrating, Fin focused on the feel of his brother and where he might have gone. At the moment, there was a blankness to his presence. Out there, but just beyond perception. Rogue didn’t want to be found immediately.
Probably protecting their prize. They’d only waited a few hundred years for her to be found, and the first word they get of her, she’s trapped in a prison with a shadow demon feeding on her.
Not ideal.
Still…
The white square turned crimson as he continued cleaning his hands. They met no resistance as they made their way down the mountain. Finding vulnerable access points to the prison warded by magic and layered with the