Blood & Steel (2 page)

“Dammit, I’m not going to kill you!” he snarled.

She didn’t dignify that with an answer. She was too busy writhing in his hold, bucking hard against his strength. Anybody but a nanotekker would have had a hell of a time holding on to a desperate, pissed-off vampire, but Blade controlled her furious struggles with ease.

“Elyn, if you’d just—”

Rage popped her fangs, and she turned her head and sank them into the palm of his hand.

“Gaah! Bitch!” His right arm released its python grip on her shoulder. She barely had time to realize that was a very bad sign before blackness exploded in her skull.  

* * * *

The little vamp went limp. Blade shook his stinging hand and ordered a scan.
Unconscious but uninjured
, his nanoplant told him.

How long will she be out?

Estimated three-point-two minutes.

He jerked field restraints out of a belt pouch, and went to work twisting them around her wrists. A nanoplant-transmitted order activated the flexible coils, and they snapped rigid, tightening barely enough to dimple the skin. He dug out a thigh set and wrapped them around her upper legs above the knees, then followed that up with an ankle pair.
Sedation field
, he ordered them.

Sedation field activated,
they chorused.

There. That would keep her out until he told the restraints to allow her to regain consciousness.

His captive safely trussed, he got to his feet and considered her, rubbing his jaw. Between the head-butt and that elbow strike, tomorrow he’d have a set of impressive bruises. A human would be dead.

Vampy could hit.

He surveyed her grimly as she splayed face-down on the floor, reluctantly noticing her very nice ass. Actually, the whole package was gorgeous, which was how she’d seduced him and gotten his team killed. He stuck his foot under her body and flipped her over on her back.

She wore a gleaming dark blue skinsuit piped in crimson, with red and blue armored boots. The snug armor hugged Elyn’s long, delicious body, with its high, full breasts. Her waist was smaller than the spread of his big hands, and her legs went into next week. She had an oval face and not much in the way of cheekbones, dewy, unlined skin, and a delicately long nose above a full mouth. Her eyes were huge and green when they’d been open, lashes long and feathery as a doll’s, with a tumble of bright golden curls to match.

She looked at most twenty-four, a pretty neat trick for a woman pushing seventy. She’d been just nineteen when that bastard Kruz had assassinated her mother and enslaved her. That was fifty years ago. Fifty years as a slave to one of the nastiest assassins in human space, a fate Blade himself had escaped only because she’d warned him Kruz was hunting him.

He owed her for that. But by playing sexual bait for him, she’d gotten both his team and his protectee killed, and he owed her for that too.

So he’d killed Kruz, who had murdered all of Blade’s people so bloodily and spread his protectee’s guts all over the man’s house. Those six deaths were only the latest of Kruz’s total. The bastard had been killing for three centuries, many of them murders for hire. Others had apparently been for the sheer joy of it. The vampire had particularly enjoyed butchering women.

Which was why Blade had taken more than an hour to finish him. Kruz had deserved every instant of blood and agony.

Now, he meant to deal with the others responsible starting with Elyn Castel. After her, he’d hunt down No’bin Urthar and Stig Daven, Kruz’s vampire henchmen who had directly participated in the murders. Regardless of what he did with Elyn, Daven and Urthar were dead. And he fully intended to take his time killing them.

Now, Blade bent and picked her up, draping her across one shoulder. She was surprisingly heavy. Despite her delicate build, she was more muscular than she appeared, and her vampire nature gave her bones and muscles an extra solidity.

He started for the nearest door, one hand cupping her delicious ass. It was a very talented ass too, as she’d demonstrated during his seduction that night six months ago. Elyn knew how to use that lush little body of hers in inventive, skillfully erotic ways. Nanotekker that he was, Blade knew his way around a female body, but she’d still shown him a thing or two. He was looking forward to finding out if she had other tricks up her luscious sleeve.

She owed him another night, and he fully intended to collect.

Chapter 2

Elyn woke into a nightmare.

She was naked and bound in force restraints, spread-eagled across a bunk in an unfamiliar ship’s cabin.
But he’s dead
, her disoriented brain shrieked.
Kruz is dead! This isn’t supposed to happen again!

He’d fooled her. Somehow he’d made Elyn think Blade had killed him, but he was still alive, still capable of plunging her into horror. There’d be knives next, ripping into her flesh and muscle. And Urthar, smirking like a demon as he plied his lash under his master’s command, tearing screams from her raw throat.

 The vampires would lap up her blood and pain like cats sharing a bowl of cream, repulsive tongues tracing over her skin until she wanted to vomit. Then they’d rape her, dicks ripping her dry cunt in merciless thrusts until she screamed her throat raw.

Kruz loved listening to her scream. He’d told her so often enough.

The door chimed and whispered open.  Elyn jerked her head around, expecting to see Kruz stroll in, moving with that insouciant grace, so astonishing in such a mountainous brute. No’Bin Urthar and Stig Daven would be right on his heels, grinning like a pair of devils, eager to share in her rape.

Instead, Blade filled the door, dressed in black skinpants and gleaming black boots, an equally black shirt open to bare his elegantly muscled chest. He gave her a lazy smile that faded as he took in her expression.

“You’ve got to go,” she told him frantically. “He’s coming, he’s here, somehow he survived.”

Dark eyes flickered. “Who’s here?”

“Kruz! He’s still alive!”

His expression hardened with suspicion. “Are you trying to play me?”

Panic clawed at her with icy talons, making it hard to think. “You’re Kith, you fool! If he gets his hands on you, he’ll enslave you. It’ll all be for nothing.” She was doing it again. Kruz had already punished her viciously for warning Blade and allowing him to escape, but she didn’t care. She couldn’t let him be taken.

Blade’s eyes widened. “You’re serious. Oh, Stellar Gods.” He crossed the cabin in three long strides, bent over her and started stripping off the restraints from her ankles and wrists.

“You’ve got to run,” she whispered, terrified and obsessed. “Leave me. He’ll be here any minute. You can’t take me with you—he’ll find us. He’ll know where I am. I can never escape. He always finds me. Always—”

“Elyn, he’s dead!” Blade sat down and dragged her into his arms. He felt so strong and hard, almost as if he could protect her. But he couldn’t. No one could. “I killed him three months ago. He can’t hurt you.”

“No, he’s still alive, he's tied me up like he always—”

“That was me, dammit.” His powerful arms tightened around her, and he stroked her hair. “I was just being a smartass. Trying to play a bondage game.” He growled a curse, the sound raw with self-disgust. “Apparently not one of my better ideas.”

Elyn froze, afraid to hope. Some bone-deep part of her soul had always known Kruz was out there, just waiting for her to relax her guard. “Are you sure? Are you
sure
he’s dead? He’s so fucking cunning, and he loves tricks, loves to make you think there’s a chance when there’s not. This is just the kind of thing he’d do.”

“Oh, he’s dead, all right,” Blade told her with grim certainty. “I’d show you a memage, except I don’t think you need to see that much gore right now.”

Well, that would be proof—a memory image taken directly from Blade’s recollection of the incident. Faint hope rose through her fear. “No, please, show me. If he’s dead, I need to see it.”

“All right.” He sighed. “Here, look.”

The next instant, a three-dimensional image filled the air beside the bunk. The corpse sprawled across a ship’s deck, covered in blood, its decapitated head lying nearby. Crimson splashed Kruz’s broad, brutal face and hatchet nose. His icy eyes were wide with astonished fury, while his narrow lips lay open over his fangs.

Elyn was no stranger to violence, so despite the blood, she could make out the deep wounds across the corpse’s chest, arms and legs that looked as if they’d been hacked with a nanoknife. The quantity of blood was consistent with his wounds. It splashed the bulkhead and puddled on the deck around him in wide red pools.

“It’s him,” she whispered, astonished. “You really did it. You killed Kruz.”

“And I find myself very glad I took my time.” He stroked a hand through her hair again. “You don’t have to be afraid anymore.”

“The newsies all said he was dead.” Elyn sank against Blade’s side as she stared at the image. “And I didn’t feel him in my mind. He’d always been there, ever since he’d turned me. I had hoped he was dead, but deep down I was afraid it might be some kind of elaborate trick. He knew you were hunting him, so maybe he—.”

“He didn’t. He’s definitely dead.” Blade studied the image with grim satisfaction. “Really, really dead.”

“Thank God.” She gave him a blazing grin. “Thank you.”

* * * *

That radiant joy in that grin was in stark contrast to the white terror on her face when Blade had walked into his cabin. The mental damage she’d suffered at Kruz’s hands was obviously far greater than he’d realized. In his defense, she’d showed no sign of rape trauma during that night six months ago. Just the opposite. She’d made love to him with a hungry passion that suggested she wanted him just as much as he wanted her.

So he’d tied her up tonight, intending a teasing display of dominance that would frighten her, but not terrorize. But the minute Blade had walked back into his quarters, he’d realized his mistake. She’d been pale as frost, her green eyes huge and helpless, her body racked by rolling shivers of animal panic.

Blade was shocked by the contrast between this terrified woman and the tough, competent warrior who had eluded him for the last three months. Her irrational conviction that Kruz was still alive told him everything he needed to know about her treatment at the vampire’s hands.

For weeks now, he’d been wrestling with what to do about her role in the death of his team. Before tonight, he thought that since she’d been able to warn him of Kruz’s intention to enslave him, she could have also warned him his people were in danger.  But now he was beginning to realize how astonishing it was that she’d been able to warn him about anything at all.

Suddenly a slender hand cupped his head, curled into a fist in his hair, and dragged his head down. Elyn’s hungry mouth covered his, licking and biting with delicate greed and feral hunger.

He drew in a startled breath that reemerged as a moan. He’d never had anyone kiss him with such ravenous need, like a drowning woman gulping air. Her tongue thrust between his lips in hot demand, and she slid across his lap, straddling him. He was instantly aware that she was gloriously naked, her bare breasts full and warm against his chest. All that lay between his cock and her cunt was the thin fabric of his skinpants.

Her free hand moved to cradle his face, her fingers warm and tender as her tongue swirled around his. She rolled her hips, pressing her weight deliciously against his hardening shaft, brushing her hard nipples back and forth across his chest. The friction was exquisite, perfectly calculated to drive him out of his mind.

Arousal hit him like a storm, despite his bewildered confusion. What had happened to the panic-stricken woman who’d greeted him when he’d walked in?

“Wait, I’m getting psychic whiplash,” Blade panted when she broke away from his mouth to begin nibbling her way to his ear. “Weren’t you scared out of your mind a minute ago?”

“He’s dead,” Elyn growled against his mouth, her hands moving to fist in his shirt. She ripped it off his shoulders with one hard, twisting jerk. “I’d have been his slave for decades more, but you killed him. You
freed
me. I don’t have to murder any more. I don’t have to crawl to him. I don’t have to suffer. And I
want to fuck
.”

He blinked at the rough demand and swallowed hard, his mouth suddenly full of saliva. She slid off his lap, grabbed the heel of his boot, and hauled. Fasteners popped and the boot fell away from his calf.

Elyn went to work on its gleaming mate, her eyes fierce as a hawk’s. When the second boot thumped to the floor, she grabbed the waistband of his skinpants. They tore away in her ruthless grip, leaving him resting on his elbows with his cock lying hard and heavy against his belly. He blinked up at her.

Elyn stared at his shaft as she slid onto the mattress until she crouched over him like a feline predator. Her blonde hair tumbled across his thighs as she lowered her head in a cascade of cool silken curls, and her long fingers felt warm when she wrapped them around him.

And her mouth—Oh, Stellar Gods, her mouth was hot and wet, lips sealing hard, tongue sliding back and forth around his shaft. Every time she sucked, pleasure spiked in his blood, a hot thrum that followed every flick of her tongue and stroke of her fingers.

His eyes tracked the swing of her breasts and he sat up to cup them. They filled his hands, the skin impossibly smooth and warm, nipples flushed a delicate rose. He teased one with thumb and forefinger, pinching and stroking. She purred around his cock, a soft feline rumble of hunger and pleasure.

He reached with his other hand to stroke down her back, enjoying the contours of delicate shoulder blades, the dip of her waist, the curve of her ass, at once strong and deliciously feminine. He didn’t think he’d ever felt anything as smooth as her skin, so ripe and soft beneath his fingertips.

He explored her lovely backside, dipping between her thighs until he found the tight, wet opening of her sex. He caught his breath in anticipation as he slid two fingers inside her.