Succubus Unchained - Heather Long Page 0,23

the night. I didn’t dare sleep, my eyes focused on the shadows as I half-expected one of them to step out like some cosmic joke had been played on me.

Three weeks later, I still watched the shadows, but sitting on Elias’ deck overlooking his backyard while his cats lazed with me in the sun and I drank a beer, there were no shadows to fear. I’d not seen or heard from any of them.

True to his word, Rogue hadn’t called me. That didn’t mean he couldn’t trace the phone. I kept it, despite all the reasons I should probably have gotten rid of it.

The sliding door to the house opened, and Elias stepped out. His close-cropped dark hair glistened from his shower. He’d only thrown on a pair of shorts, leaving the rest of his dark brown skin bare. He held two fresh bottles of beer in his hand, and without a word, I drained the last of my first bottle and accepted the second.

He settled on the chair next to me and leaned back. “You ready to tell me what the hell is going on yet?”

I’d been with him a week. Shown up on his porch in the middle of a thunderstorm, drenched like a wet cat and smelling about as good—at least according to him. His eyes had narrowed though as he dragged me in for a hug. It lasted all of five seconds before he’d slammed me back against a wall and stared at me.

“When the fuck did you become a vampire, Red?”

Yeah. That conversation hadn’t been fun. Not that you could call it much of a conversation. I’d given him the absolute bare minimum of facts. I’d made a mistake going home with a vampire from the club. Things got out of hand. I’d done a short stint in prison and escaped. I’d been trying to get back ever since.

All of it was absolutely true, just edited for public consumption. I hadn’t breathed a word about Maddox, Fin, and Rogue, or he-who-could-go fuck-himself. After, I’d just asked him if I could stay there until I figured out what I was going to do.

Fin had been right. My apartment was gone, already rented out to someone else. Everything that I’d ever owned gone with it. A stop by the shop revealed they’d even hired someone new. Life had gone on.

It was like I’d never been there. No trace of me lingered.

The hollowness inside at that revelation had left me wallowing in bed for two days.

That was all Elias allowed me before he’d dragged me out and made me go running with him.

Did I mention he’s a wolf?

He can fucking run.

I’d been in pain afterward, lungs burning and strained while I discovered muscles I hadn’t even known existed. They hurt so bad, I’d barely been able to walk. I really didn’t get how this shit was supposed to work. I was dead, right? Vampires died, then came back. That was how it worked. But my lungs hurt and my legs…well, I was half-convinced amputation with a rusty saw would have been better.

That was before I woke the second day and could barely move.

Elias, the backstabbing traitor, laughed at me and dragged me out again.

That was four days ago.

We’d gone running every day since.

He insisted it would get better. I insisted he was insane. We agreed to disagree.

Every evening, after a run, we returned to his place and took a shower—separately—then met out here to while away the evening hours before he fired up the grill. The man lived on a steady diet of steak, steak, and did I mention steak?

He should have been a cattle rancher.

Why raise when he could rustle? That was his usual response. I tipped the beer up to take a long pull. It was icy cold and didn’t do crap to slake the thirst that had begun to plague me over the last couple of days. I hadn’t fed since I’d taken that last bite from Rogue.

The absolute lack of appetite had been a gift. Maybe they’d all been wrong. Sure, delusion and denial weren’t that far apart. I was a vampire. Okay, but I was a hybrid, so maybe that just meant I didn’t need to feed. Not the way I had been before my transition completed.

It could happen, right?

“Fi?”

I dragged my maudlin thoughts together and cobbled them into something resembling coherency before I shrugged. “Nothing to say. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I can’t just…go back to what I