Blood Ecstasy (Blood Curse Series Book 8) (2 page)

And it’s been the ruin of many a poor boy, and god I know I’m one.

My mother was a tailor, sewed my new blue jeans.
 

My father was a gamblin’ man, down in New Orleans…”

Damn, the Animals could really sing that folk song—Burdon’s voice was all grit, angst, and brutal melody. A sweet jolt of cocktail rocked him at his core, and he started to drift even further away…
 

“Now the only thing a gambler needs is a suitcase and a trunk,

And the only time he’s satisfied is when he’s on a drunk.”

Something
visceral seized Julien’s attention, and he pulled himself away from the music, temporarily:
Shelly.
 

Where was Shelly?
 

She was sliding down his lap, falling over his knees, slumping to the floor—
that wasn’t right, was it
?
 

“Oh mother, tell your children not to do what I have done,

Spend your life in sin and misery in the house of the Rising Sun.”

Julien thought he reached for the female, but rather, he tightened his grip on the glass even more, shattering the crystal into a dozen serrated pieces, each one immediately embedding in his flesh.
 

As crimson rivulets trickled down his wrist, soaked the pads of his fingers, and stained his nails, he fell back into the chair and dropped the remaining glass.
 

Nothing mattered in this moment.
 

Not the pain in his hand. Not the woman on the floor. Not the emptiness in his soul.
 

There was only darkness, ecstasy, and peace.
 

That, and the hauntingly beautiful melody pulsing through the dark.

Rebecca Johnston tucked several
golden-brown
wisps of hair behind her ear, out of her tired eyes, as she checked her clipboard one more time. She crossed off the previous address,
619 Golden Antelope Way
, scribbling a messy note in the margin:
No one home
.

What kind of a town was this anyway?
 

Didn’t anyone answer their door?
 

She sighed, glaring at the paltry numbers in front of her, the pitifully low donations, and then she checked her watch, feeling the weight of the day as well as the chill of the night.

Yes, it was late.
 

They had been at it since 9 AM, knocking on doors, practically begging residents to donate to VOSU (Victims of Stalkers United), and she should really give it a rest…but she just couldn’t go home without a victory.
 

Just one victory.

VOSU was an extremely worthy cause, and to be honest, Rebecca was hardly objective about the struggling
nonprofit organization. Not only had she spent the last five years of her life fleeing from one state to another, trying to escape a violent stalker of her own, but she had also taken a counseling position at a local Denver VOSU support group. At least once a week she donated her fund-raising time, as well as her valuable experience, trying to help
victims of stalking.
 

She frowned, wishing desperately that her colleagues were still with her, still
prodding her forward and providing encouragement, still knocking on potentially hopeful doors. As it stood, each one of them had bowed out
the moment they had
approached
Dark Moon Vale. They had simply refused to go one step further than the Silverton Creek border.

It had been so,
so
strange…

Almost as if some invisible hand of doom had dipped down out of the sky and forced them back from their objective, as if it had physically stopped their progression. They hadn’t been just hesitant to go on; they had been utterly and inexplicably terrified of crossing the municipal line
and entering the secluded valley.
 

It had made no sense at all.
 

None.

Dark Moon Vale was a booming tourist town. Hordes of people came each winter and summer to enjoy the ski resort or the spa, the hiking, river-rafting, or horseback riding. Heck, the casino was a huge draw all by itself. And the wealth? Oh good heavens, there was more money tucked away in these wooded acres than in Beverly Hills, the Hamptons, and Wall Street combined. For all intents and purposes, Dark Moon Vale had the potential to be a fund-raising haven, a virtual gold mine of limitless potential;
yet and still, her colleagues had utterly refused to step one single foot in the valley.
 

A sudden gust of January wind swirled around her, tossing light crystal snowflakes into her hair and eyes, and Rebecca grasped the collar of her stiff wool coat, drawing it tighter around her slender shoulders. She hunched forward to preserve warmth, tucked her clipboard beneath her arm, and stared at the large rustic house in front of her—at the long, winding driveway that led up to the distant front door.
 

Oh, hell, can’t anybody live right next to someone else in this place?

As she made her way up the steep, snaking slope, the oddest thing began to happen: The sky grew ten shades darker, almost as if someone had just turned out the galactic lights, and the most brilliant configuration of stars began to twinkle in the deepening sky, like spotlights projecting cosmic beams at the earth.
 

And the moon…

What in the world?
 

The moon looked like it was
bleeding.
 

It was fading from white to pale yellow; from pale yellow to rose; and finally, from rose to dark crimson-red.
 

Rebecca froze, suddenly wishing she had taken her coworkers’ advice, that she had never stepped foot in Dark Moon Vale. She was about halfway up the driveway, ready to turn around, when the magic in the sky ironically pushed her forward:
 

Forget raising funds for charity!
 

She needed to get inside.
 

Whatever was happening with the sky—and she had no idea what it was—it certainly wasn’t natural, and she was smart enough not to stand around and gawk. If comets were going to plummet from the heavens, leaving craters in the earth, she wasn’t going to stand there and wave, completely vulnerable and out in the open, hoping they passed her by. Surely, someone in this town would give her sanctuary, just until she knew what was going on.

She hurried up the remaining segment of the driveway and hopped over a narrow bed of unkempt vegetation, perhaps some sort of xeriscape, landing on the large wide-planked front porch. She reached for the brass knocker on one of two thick wooden doors, and paused—
 

What the heck?
 

The door was partially open.

In fact, the panel was ajar, and there was a dark, brooding melody blasting through a set of crystal-clear speakers—
wasn’t that “House of the Rising Sun”
?—yet all the lights in the residence were off. There wasn’t a single flicker of illumination, not even the glow from a warm fire or the dim radiance of a pair of candles on a distant table. Yet the glitter from the dazzling stars above was so luminescent that it flashed inside the doorway like a pair of high-beams from an oncoming truck.
 

Rebecca crept slowly toward the threshold and then tapped the door lightly to force it further open. She leaned forward and peered inside…

Her breath caught in her throat.

Holy Mother of God.

There was a man sitting in the middle of the front room like an ancient slave from the time of the Roman Coliseum: He was built like a gladiator, at least six-foot-two, all hard, unforgiving muscle, with chiseled, granite-like features, and his crystalline, moonstone-gray eyes stared absently at the ceiling above him even as his head lolled back on a solitary chair. His right arm was hanging limply at his side, and his hand—
his
hand was bleeding!—
dripping steady droplets of dark red blood, like a leaky faucet, onto the coarse, wide-planked floors. There was no other furniture in the room, just the chair, the stereo, and—

Rebecca screamed
, her throat instantly burning from the raw, sudden abuse of her windpipe.
 

She dropped the clipboard, clasped her
hands over her mouth, and gagged, frantically trying to back away from the door. There was a beautiful blond woman lying on the floor at the gladiator’s feet. She was clearly unconscious, and her neck was stained with dried, crusted blood.
Oh dear Lord, what had he done to her?
 

Rebecca had to get help.
 

She had to call 911.
 

She had to get away!
 

Now.

Before she could turn and run, the man’s head rocked forward; his smooth, constricted pupils met hers; and his lips turned up in a dark parody of a smile, as
sardonic as it was savage. “Where are you going,
Rebecca
?”
 

one

The man knew her name.
 

Rebecca’s heart seized in her chest as an abrupt surge of adrenaline flooded her veins, and for a moment, she actually believed her heart might stop, just simply quit beating, right then and there. She was going to drop dead from fear.
 

Embracing the sudden surge of cortisol instead, she gasped for air, sprang out the door, and leaped over the dried vegetation in a mad dash to scramble away.

And then she froze in midair.
 

What—the—hell?

“Get in the house!” A thick, gravelly voice reverberated all around her, rattled her bones, and caused her teeth to chatter. The male gladiator was looming in the doorway—
and just how had he moved so quickly?
—staring at her with those otherworldly, moonstone-gray eyes, and his thick, sculpted lips were plastered into a scowl, his wrists still stained with blood. She tried to kick her feet, to no avail, to force her body back down to the ground, but she couldn’t.
 

She couldn’t.

There was nothing she could do.

There was only him.

The terrifying man, his ungodly power over her desire to escape, and his otherworldly control.
 

For a moment, Rebecca couldn’t help but wonder—was he the devil with flesh and blood, a reincarnated Viking from a time gone by? Somehow, she knew he was a thousand times more lethal than any stalker. His presence was so fierce, so intimidating, so all-pervasive and exacting.

Rebecca wished she could just disappear.

Or die.
 

A silent scream echoed in her mind, but it didn’t pierce the air. Whatever he had done to her body, it had obviously included her throat, and she was utterly helpless to defy him. And then, as if of their own accord, her feet drifted softly to the ground, and her body began to slowly rotate, turning clockwise, toward the fearsome man. She felt like a puppet on a gifted master’s strings, and something deep inside of her recoiled.
 

This wasn’t right.
 

This wasn’t natural.
 

This guy—was he even human?

Indifferent to the dark crimson stains on the pads of his fingers or the cuts still scoring his palms, the Viking tried to take a step forward and stumbled to the side, staggering in the doorway.
Was he drunk? High? Or just tanked up with malicious intent?
He braced a heavily muscled arm against the doorframe and ran his free hand through his strange mahogany hair, deepening the perfect, tapered layers with highlights, streaked in blood.
He looked like he was struggling, trying to make sense of his surroundings, straining to regain his bearings. “Becca,” he whispered, once again using her name. “Come to me, angel. I can’t come to you.”
 

Rebecca shuddered at the terrifying intimacy of his words, their audacious, affectionate nature.
 

Come to me, angel?
 

Was he insane?
 

She couldn’t move!
 

And even if she could, hell would freeze over three times; pigs would fly as commonplace as birds; and Rebecca would have to lose her reasoning mind to ever consider such a demand.
 

No way.
 

No how.
 

And then her feet began to move…to swiftly shuffle forward…carrying her toward the man she feared more than death itself, taking her to his doorstep.
 

Rebecca whimpered helplessly as she quickly closed the distance between them. What the hell was happening!
Why was this happening? Who was this guy—
what was this guy?
—and how was he moving her body with nothing more than his will?

Halting no fewer than twelve inches away from his towering frame, Rebecca
peered into the stranger’s haunted eyes and winced. Despite the fact that his pupils were constricted—he
was
clearly on something—his features were utterly arresting: perfect, harshly masculine, and set in a cold mask of granite. One look into those devilish eyes, and she knew he possessed an iron will, an indomitable spirit, and a complete lack of mercy toward anyone who opposed him, anyone who got in his way.