Darker After Midnight (39 page)

“Bloodlust,” she murmured quietly.

He nodded. “Near enough to taste it. There’s a tipping point in the disease that I haven’t reached yet. If I cross that line and turn Rogue, I’m lost.”

“Like Quentin and Elise’s son?” she asked, her brow furrowing now. “You told me that’s what happened to him, before you …”

“Before I shot him,” he said, the admission bitter even now. “Yeah. But with Camden it was different. He’d gotten mixed up with a new club drug that had been making the rounds last year in Boston. It was called Crimson. The shit was potent, a speedball designed especially for the Breed. One whiff or taste of that red powder and it was all you could do not to fuck, fight, or fang everything in your reach.”

“My God,” Tavia gasped. “It sounds terrible.”

Chase grunted. “Not if you’re a young male bored out of his skull in the Darkhavens. They ate it like candy, and some of them learned that it was the fast lane to Bloodlust. Cam was one of them.”

“I’m sorry.”

He shrugged. “Me too. The Order and I took out the Crimson dealer’s lab, destroyed all of the product. Well … almost all of it. I kept a vial of it for myself. One last dose, enough to be lethal.”

“The silver container I found in your desk in Boston,” Tavia murmured. “Why would you want to keep something like that?”

He didn’t have to answer. She would read his logic plainly enough. The dose of Crimson was his escape plan, his silver bullet, should Bloodlust finally pull him under all the way. Which more and more didn’t seem so much a question of if but when.

He ground out a raw curse.

Walk away. That’s what he should do—what he’d done every other time shit got too real for him, too heavy to deal with. And there was a part of him now that wanted nothing more than to vanish into the night and never look back. Just run … until he met daylight and all his problems—all his damnable failures, past, present, and future—were eaten by the sun.

That would have been the easy thing for him to do. Hard was making himself sit there and sweat through the shudders that were wrenching his body from the inside out. Hard was laying his weaknesses and his ugliest sins bare as he looked into Tavia’s tender gaze and waited for the moment her concern mutated into justifiable contempt. Or worse, pity.

But Tavia’s eyes wouldn’t release him. Those clear, calm, spring-green eyes held him in the darkness like a caress. As he looked at her now, he realized the feral glow of his own gaze had banked. His irises no longer washed her in amber fire. Even the hungered throb of his fangs had eased in the time he’d been out there alone with her.

“You haven’t lost the fight yet, Chase,” she told him. “Isn’t there anything you can do to help yourself get better? Maybe I can help you over time. I’d like to try, if you’d let me.”

He stared at her, leveled by the genuine compassion—by the depth of feeling he could hardly fathom—that shone from her beautiful face. He couldn’t resist reaching out to stroke her cheek. “How can you be so caring after everything you’ve just heard? When I’ve done nothing but make your life hell since the moment I first saw you?”

“You haven’t made my life hell. Dragos did that.” Her hands were warm and soothing against his face as she drew him close and pressed a brief kiss to his lips. “You gave me truth, Chase. You have from the very beginning. You’ve opened my eyes. I may not like everything I see, but it’s real and it’s honest and I feel like I’m finally alive. You’ve given me all of that.”

He swore under his breath, wondering how it was possible that he’d allowed this female to get under his skin the way she had. Even worse, she had somehow gotten inside his heart, into his very blood.

Ironic that he should find her now, when the last thing he wanted—the very last thing he deserved—was a woman as extraordinary as Tavia Fairchild.

Whether or not he deserved her, Chase couldn’t keep from wrapping his palm around her nape and pulling her close for his kiss. She tasted so sweet against his mouth. Felt so good and warm against him as she leaned into his embrace and parted her lips to accept the sweep of his tongue into her mouth.

He could have kissed her all night. Might have, if not for the sudden whoop and shouts of children racing out of the house to play in the snow. Chase pivoted his head to watch Mira, Kellan, and Nathan bound off the deck and into the pine-ringed yard with
the compound’s two canines—Alexandra’s majestic Alaskan gray-and-white wolf dog and a scrappy brownish mutt terrier that belonged to Dante and Tess.

The kids tore right past, barely pausing to notice Chase and Tavia wrapped in each other’s arms. Kellan stooped to grab a handful of snow and packed it into a ball. He lobbed it at Mira, missing her by mere inches as she dodged right and retaliated with a projectile of her own. The snowball nailed the teen dead center in the chest.

“Good arm,” Chase called to her, which earned him a big grin from the pint-size blond imp.

More volleys were exchanged between Mira and the two boys, until suddenly Chase and Tavia found themselves under fire from the trio. They scrambled to their feet, Tavia laughing as Chase tried to pull her to safety behind the trunk of a thick pine. One of Nathan’s snowballs smashed into the back of his head, raining icy powder down the nape of his neck and into the collar of his shirt.

“This means war,” Chase shouted, grabbing a handful of snow and sending a ball shooting toward the kids and the dogs barking and jumping all around them.

Tavia’s giggles were the most miraculous thing he’d ever heard. He wheeled around on her, full of empty bluster. “You think this is funny, female?” Her smile went wider, but her eyes glimmered with as much heat as humor. He stalked toward her, grinning now. Hotter than he should be, with the kids playing behind them in the woods. “You sure you want to take me on?”

Tavia’s answering look was devastatingly inviting. “Think you can handle it?”

“Try me.” He hauled her close and kissed her like there was no tomorrow.

D
EEP IN THE WOODS NOW
, Kellan, laughing, cheeks stinging with the cold, scooped up a handful of snow with his gloves and swung around to volley it at Nathan.

The kid was gone.

Mira’s giggles trailed from several yards to his left, the barks of the two dogs following her farther into the cover of the dense forest. Kellan paused, silent, listening. Searching the dark for Nathan, anticipating the sudden cold explosion of incoming enemy snowball fire.

This was only mock warfare; Kellan knew that. But there was a spark of competitiveness inside him—a needling urge to prove himself a capable opponent, especially against this strange newcomer who’d been raised and trained by the villain responsible for the murders of Kellan’s family.

His senses quirked with the faint stirring of the air. Nathan was moving through the trees now. Kellan’s instincts prickled, sending him into a low, stealthy jog toward the subtle disruption of the boy’s movement up ahead.

He found Nathan, stalking up on Mira in silence as she played with the dogs. Nathan held a snowball in his hand. In that next instant, he let it fly at Mira.

It shot toward her like a bullet, hitting her square in the back.

She went down as though it had been gunfire, letting out a surprised cry as the force of the impact knocked her flat on her face in a drift.

“Mira!” Kellan shouted, leaping out from his cover in the pines.

He saw the look of surprise on Nathan’s face. He hadn’t intended to hurt her. But that made no difference to Kellan’s instincts. They lit up like a Roman candle, a confusing flood of concern and aggression coursing through his veins in an instant. With a roar, he lobbed his missile at Nathan, pelting the snowball at Mira’s attacker with deliberate force.

Nathan dodged the assault and cocked his head in question. Then he reached down and returned fire. He launched one snowball after the other, a relentless hail that drove Kellan back with the force of a hundred fists.

Kellan’s anger spiked. His sense of powerlessness kindled a raging fury inside him that exploded out of his mouth in a hoarse bellow. He got up and vaulted at Nathan, meaning to drive his fist into the stoic little killer’s face.

Nathan coolly deflected. He moved so fast, Kellan didn’t even see the defensive move coming until he found himself hitting the ground on his back, all the air leaving his lungs on a giant wheeze.

Nathan had him pinned, totally incapacitated.

A cold, wet hand was clamped around Kellan’s throat, a mere second away from crushing his larynx. Kellan couldn’t breathe.

“Stop!” Mira cried. She raced over to them, eyes wild. She tugged at Nathan’s arms, but his hold stayed firm and steady on Kellan’s neck. “Nathan, please stop! You’ll kill him!”

Her interference burned Kellan somehow. Embarrassment and humiliation, impotent outrage, rushed into his head as the pressure on his throat eased.

Nathan released him without apology. He stood up, watching without remorse as Kellan coughed and gasped, sucking in air. Mira’s face was awash in worry as she hunkered down beside him and placed a tentative hand on his shoulder. Kellan brushed her off, hating that she should witness his degradation.

He dragged his gaze up to meet the silent, placid expression of the boy who had likely killed a dozen men, any one of them far more challenging an opponent than Kellan could ever hope to be.

Kellan admired that kind of lethal ability. He’d need it, if he meant to survive in this world Dragos’s evil had created. If he meant to avenge the deaths of his kin, as a warrior of the Order one day or on his own, he would need that same cold talent—that same emotional detachment—that he saw reflecting down on him in Nathan’s unblinking eyes.

Kellan rubbed his injured throat. Summoned his voice past the acid burn of his humiliation in front of Mira and looked up at the boy who dealt so efficiently in death. “Teach me everything you know.”

TAVIA LAY
in a pleasure-drowned daze, her limbs tangled with Chase’s in the middle of the king-size bed in their room at the Order’s compound. She’d lost track of how many times they’d made love. They’d started after the snowball fight of the night before, then picked up again after spending most of the day apart—Tavia with Elise and some of the other Breedmates, sharing meals and pleasant conversation; Chase sequestered in private meetings with Lucan, Gideon, Tegan, and the rest of the warriors.

Now another night was inching toward dawn on the other side of the shuttered windows and Tavia was blissfully, thoroughly spent.

Eyes closed, caught in a lazy, sated doze, she felt him shift slightly beside her on the bed. He kissed her eyelids, one then the other, his lips gentle even as his arousal nudged her hip in blatant demand.

“Mmm,” she moaned, her mouth curving as she lifted her heavy lids. “Good morning. You’re up early.”

“If you’re anywhere near me, guaranteed, I’m always going to be up.”

She looked into his dark blue gaze and smiled. “Good thing I
have Breed genetics too. Otherwise I’d never be able to keep up with you.”

“Yeah, but I’d make sure you had fun trying.” He kissed her, long and slow, rousing her senses into a heated rush of wakefulness. “Merry Christmas, beauty.”

“Christmas?” She thought back on the days and realized it really was. “Never in a million years could I have guessed I’d wake up naked in a vampire’s arms on Christmas morning.”

He grinned. “Santa Claus has already been here and everything. Want to see what he brought for you?”

She laughed. “Is it a big present?”

His eyes gleamed devilishly, lit with amber sparks. “Very big.”

“With a big red bow on it?”

He glanced down and shrugged, his mouth quirked in a sardonic smile that showed just the barest tips of his fangs. “How about a jaunty cap instead?”

She was still giggling as he kissed her again. When he slid into the wet cleft of her body, her giggles turned to sighs and then to moans of pleasure. He’d learned how to play every inch of her by now, and he was ruthless in his seduction. She surrendered to him wholly, crying out as he brought her to a swift, fevered orgasm.

“My God,” she panted, her own fangs filling her mouth as he stoked her toward another shattering release. “Merry Christmas to me.”

His answering growl was one of pure masculine pride. “You should see what I do for birthdays.”

She laughed drowsily and gazed up at him. The sight of him this close and intimate felt so familiar now, so right. The feel of his naked body pressed against hers was as natural to her as her own breath, her own heartbeat.

And the warm knot that squeezed so tightly in her breast, and traveled lower still, into her very core, was an ache she hoped never to lose.

Deep down, she wondered if she should be afraid.

Because somehow, she realized she had fallen in love with Sterling Chase.