Death's Redemption (The Eternal Lovers Series) (6 page)

Her people had been tracking the murders for weeks. Piecing the puzzle together as best they could. Finding dead bodies and matching them to the missing victims days later, looking like macabre princesses the way they’d been laid out and displayed. It’d been obvious their limbs had been first sawed off, then reattached. Their faces painted bright in garish colors, and their bodies all dressed in ball gowns. Each woman had been threaded through with laces, turning her into a human marionette, and posed into positions of beauty. Some had worn ballerina shoes and been forced to pirouette, others had been draped in nothing but fur, looking like sex-kitten cadavers.

It’d been sick and twisted, but it hadn’t been the worst of it. The worst was knowing no matter how many girls they found there’d always be one item missing.

Their eyes.

The killer’s treasure. Or at least that was what the strike force thought.

Mila had known differently. Deep in her soul, her gut, she’d known why the eyes were missing.

She’d told no one else; only she and her kind knew the truth. Understood the significance of it. The bodies were incidental; the countless “Black Dahlias” hadn’t been the true crime. That was the mask, the cover-up for the truth.

The truth was the killer had been searching her out.

Somehow she’d gotten sloppy, done something to alert the shadow to her whereabouts. Because the monster was out and he was hunting for her. She was the last of her clan. She didn’t know the face or the name of the monster, but her ancestors had kept records of its misdeeds. The part it had played in the O’Fallen family history.

Mila was a seer. Meaning she could see the future. Meaning any creature to get their hands on her would seek to control her, to force her to use her powers to give them the upper hand within their subclave. If the vampires had taken her, and turned her as they’d attempted to do, she would have had no choice but to forever be their puppet. Forever pump them information to make them unbeatable. Knowing the future meant you could prevent and thwart any attack that came your way. In the wrong hands, Mila was a ticking time bomb.

People might believe or think that there were many future seers in the world; there were enough humans claiming to be the real deal. But it just wasn’t so; the talent lay in the blood. You had to be born with the genes to do it, and the genes were dying out. It was what made her kind so desirable. Though human, she was a rare breed indeed.

“How did you know what I am?” the reaper growled, and the sound of it didn’t scare her or make her want to cower.

In fact, it made her own animal come padding out of the deep recesses of her mind. “Did you
creatures
,” she spat, “honestly believe humans wouldn’t do our due diligence? Wouldn’t learn the strengths and weaknesses of those out of the closet?”

Silver eyes narrowed into thin slits. “You know nothing of my kind.”

She scoffed. “I know you belong to a class of filthy fae.”

Nostrils flaring, he gave no other outward indication that her slur had disturbed him. “And what would you know of the fae?”

Lips twitching, she tapped her nails on her biceps. “I know that it was your lot that started the bloody Great Wars. That you’re a covetous kind, petty and jealous. That a human life means nothing to you. You’re close-minded, selfish, and so damn vain you think the world should prostrate itself before ye.”

At the end her brogue came out. Anger always caused that. She was usually so good at hiding it, but just being in front of the smug bastard made her feel a level of violence she’d never felt before in her life. Hiding the thing was one of the few ways she had to successfully keep herself hidden while in plain sight.

Torn between her desire to rake her nails down his face or just slap the hell out of it, she curled her fingers inward instead and turned aside, only to stare into the slightly filmy eyes of her other captor.

“Lone wolf.” She curled her nose. “You are so rare. In fact, I know of only one.”

His irises flared.

Lifting a brow, she nodded. “Necrophilia is apparently perverse even to monsters. Who knew, right?” She tsked, and she knew she was acting like a bitch, but it was how she coped. Rather than give in to the fear and scream and cry, she became a shrew.

He shrugged, but she could tell she’d rattled him because his breathing had become suddenly erratic. “No, I suppose they don’t.” Scratching softly at the top of his wild mane of brown hair, he frowned, looking at her as if she were the strange one.

“What?” she snapped, at her wits’ end.

“How do you know so much about…us?” The red-haired faerie said the words as if he loathed the idea of grouping himself into the
other
category.

Standing here now, before her, the man was so much more than her dreams had made him seen. She’d never been into redheads, finding the shade of hair usually accompanied a pale shade of flesh and several hundred freckles to boot. But the faerie was unlike any redhead she’d ever seen. Instead of a bright orange mop, his was supple and falling to his shoulder blades. The shade looked more like a deep crimson rather than the shade of carrot she was accustomed to.

A hard, square jaw was clenched tight as his gaze roamed hot across her face and then dropped down the column of her throat before running across her suddenly too tight chest.

His lips quirked and she realized she’d been not just staring, but pretty much drooling. Humiliation crept hot fingers up her cheeks and, clearing her throat, she pinned him with her haughtiest glare.

“You should have let me die,” she hissed again, but this time not with any true anger. Her stomach was churning, her throat was burning, and she knew she was seconds away from bawling.

“You keep saying that. Trust me…” His deep, whiskey-roughened voice shivered across her body like the caress of a lover’s touch, pulling things down low and making her blood pressure rise. “If I’d had my way you’d be pushing up daisies.”

Shoulders twitching from holding herself so erect, she puffed out a breath and planted her hands on her hips.

“Now answer. My. Question.” His voice growled. Literally growled, echoing roughly through the cavernous room. A shot of heat pulsed through her blood. “Who are you? One last time to tell me the truth, human, before I decide you’re not worth my time.”

The shifter was silent as death, his filmy eyes drifting between the faerie and her. Damn that grim reaper, putting her in this position. If he’d only allowed her to die, none of this would be happening. To even contemplate breaking her oath, letting someone not of her own genus know who she really was, was blasphemous.

But the reality was she was no longer Homo sapiens. The redheaded bastard had let her become the thing she’d once helped to kill.

“I’m not mortal anymore, or have you forgotten?” Her upper lip curled. “Because of you I’m a vampire; because of you I’m no longer—”

“Well”—the monk held up a slightly gnarled finger—“that’s not entirely true.”

“What?” she and the grim reaper snapped at the same time—both turning on the now-cowering shifter.

Holding his hands up in a placating fashion, he curled his lips in an odd distortion of gums and teeth. A smile, maybe?

Pinching her brow, she shook her head. She didn’t care to hear anything they had to say; she should have died a while ago. Each second she lived, the more danger she was in. “Do you have a knife?”

The shifter frowned, clearly confused by her sudden change of subject. But not the reaper. Eyes widening, he stepped forward, clasping her forearms tight in his strong hands, and shook slightly. “Why? So you can stab it through your heart?”

She sucked in a sharp breath, and his smirk grew smug. “Think I don’t know you, human? Your intentions are written all over your face. So tell me, why do you want to off yourself so badly?” His hot gaze made her body burn, tingle, and it was suddenly hard to breathe.

Blunt fingers traced the curve of her jaw, up and around the shell of her ear, before tugging on a blond lock. Mila could hardly think when he did that, when he touched her that way, looked at her like he wanted to eat her all up, reminding her of the faerie tales of old. He was the big bad wolf and she was his prey.

Swallowing hard, she licked her lips. “I’m a vampire. I’ve been sired. They…they can’t know.”

She couldn’t believe it was her voice that sounded so breathy and sex-kittenish. It was so easy to believe the old stories about the fae now that she stood in front of one. How their beauty was as deadly as any blade, how a mortal (or immortal, as her case now was) could be beguiled and lost to the evil scheming of their cold, black hearts. How the faeries had turned brother against brother and sister against sister during the Great Wars, how they’d controlled and commanded armies of
others
to do their bidding, and all for one glance. One touch of their sexually charged flesh.

“Get off me.” Forcing every last bit of will she had into those words, she ripped herself out of his grasp, rubbing her arms up and down to erase the memory of his hands on hers. “Don’t ever touch me again.”

“You’re not sired.” The priest cleared his throat, head bobbing up and down. “I understand now. Why Lise sent her to me. You’re not sired.”

Lise.
The mention of the Ancient One’s name sent a cold shiver down Mila’s spine. She was the one being her people had never been able to learn much on. Other than the fact that she ran a club for the safe intermingling of the
others
, and that she was known to sometimes run interference between them in order to keep the balance and tenuous peace amongst species, her people hadn’t been able to gather more intel on the woman. But Mila had always suspected that Lise was so much more than a moderator. It was why in Mila’s hour of terror, hers was the first name that’d popped into her head.

“What do you mean, Lise? What does she have to do with me? And what do you mean I’m not sired?”

Licking his front teeth, the reaper swung the squirrel back and forth, and immediately the hunger she’d been able to pretend did not exist while she was furious at him came back with a vengeance.

Her body ached. Her bones hurt, the blood running through her veins pumped like thick sludge, making her aware of the gnawing, throbbing, spreading toxin through her blood. Her brain. All she could think of now was that squirrel. Ripping into it, feeling its blood soak down her throat, quenching the terrible, fiery ache spreading hot and quick. Tongue feeling three times its normal size, she licked her lips, internally raging at herself that she didn’t drink blood. She would never drink blood.

“I offer a truce.” The reaper’s smile was laced with venom. “Food.” Tipping the squirrel out until its tail brushed against the tip of her nose, a wicked gleam danced in his silver eyes as he brought it back to himself.

Throat aching, she groaned, balling her fingers tight to her side. “Food for what?” She growled, unable to stand the constant pendulum swing of the rodent in his hands.

“Facts.” He shrugged. “Just answer some questions.”

She was no longer human, therefore the vows she’d taken no longer applied. But to reveal who she’d worked for, what they’d done, could put the others at risk. On the heels of that thought came another. She was now one of the monsters she’d hunted in her past life. The irony did not escape her.

Feeling a terrible urge to cry, she gritted her teeth and nodded. “Fine. But then you give me that knife. Do we have a deal?”

S
taring at her outstretched hand, Frenzy didn’t know whether to laugh or to smack it away. He couldn’t believe this petite thing was making demands of him.

But he’d make the deal, because she didn’t need to know he had no intentions of following through with it. Shaking her hand, he nodded. “Deal.”

A visible shudder raced through her. “Good.”

“Here.” He tossed her the squirrel, his lips twitching when she snatched it out of the air, but instead of ripping into it the way any newly turned monster should have, she stared at the carcass with a look of both disdain and desperate longing.

As her pink tongue slid along her still-blunt incisors, Frenzy wondered which hunger was most prevalent—the need for meat or for blood.

“Monk,” he boomed, causing George to jerk.

“What?” he stuttered.

“The lady obviously does not wish to appear crass in public. Set a chair and table and whatever utensils you have so that she can hang on to the last dregs of her humanity.”

Turning, George went to set up a table he probably rarely used himself.

“I’m fine.” Her anger beat at him.

Smirking, Frenzy lifted his brows. “Truly? That why you’re looking at the rodent like you want to rip its head off and tear into it, or toss it away like last week’s garbage?”

Nose curling, she held it out by the tip of its tail, as far away from her nose as possible. “I don’t want to eat.”

“You say that.” His gaze rolled across her white-knuckled grip. “And yet you’re holding on to it so tight I doubt I could yank it from your cold, dead—”

Screaming, she threw the body of the animal against the farthest rock wall. “You’re right, I
am
dead.”

Snorting, he took a step toward her. “What’s the matter, blondie? Afraid of the desires you feel now? Didn’t you know tangling with a vampire might wind you up in just this situation?”

“I didn’t tangle.”

“Oh yeah”—his upper lip curled—“that’s why I found you in a known crack house. What were you doing? Buying drugs?” He chuckled. “Don’t tell me you were out for a late-night stroll through the Tenderloin, because we both know that’s not the case. You don’t walk on that side of town without knowing
exactly
why you’re there.”

From the corner of his eye, Frenzy saw George bend over to retrieve the badly broken body of the squirrel.

“You smug, arrogant faerie!”

Laughing, he grabbed both her wrists as she began flailing them at his face, pinning them tight to her side. “Yes, I think that part’s been well established. How about you start telling us the truth? We’ve danced around this long enough. Why were you there?”

Her chest heaved up and down, whispering like a breath against his own, and though he didn’t want to be affected by her touch, her smell, his entire body flared to life. His nerves tingled and he realized that though she infuriated him and made the beast inside stir, he didn’t actually hate it.

In fact…

Her lips parted when he dragged a tendril of her luscious blond hair through his fingertips.

“Let me go,” she whispered, but there was heat behind her words, and though her lips said one thing, her body betrayed her as she leaned farther into him.

A horrible smell rolled through the room. Realizing what he was about, Frenzy took a step back, feeling more discombobulated than he knew he should, dropping his arms from her immediately.

Charred flesh and singed hairs stunk up the cave. He was already annoyed, and the scent only ratcheted up his emotions. Frenzy curled his nose, glaring at George, who was rotating the body of the squirrel—which was now stuck on a spit—through flame.

Gagging, Mila tipped her face down. As bad as the smell was for him, it was likely magnified a thousandfold to her now–highly sensitive olfactory senses.

“Tell me, woman, or I’ll toss you back to those vampires you suddenly seem so afraid of being sired to.” Idle threat, but she didn’t need to know it.

The way she looked at him made dormant emotions inside of him rise up from their long slumber. Emotions like humor, curiosity, and something darkly sensual.

“You know about me. About George.” He jerked his head toward the old shifter, who was still doing something that looked a lot like cooking. “About the Great Wars. You’re what? Twenty-four, twenty-five at best?”

“Thirty-two, you arse. I’m no child.”

Thirty-two, that surprised him. Taking another long look at her, he studied the firmness of her skin, the rich gold of her hair, and her rosebud lips. When mortals became vampires, they didn’t become suddenly modelesque beauties. However they looked in life, they’d now appear in death. That was why there was the occasional elder or child amongst the fangers’ ranks. His lips quirked.

“Interesting.” He grabbed her wrists, bringing her back to his side. He couldn’t seem to help but want to touch her.

Face scrunching, she tried to yank out of his grip. She was a new monster; her strength was nowhere near the level of his, and by the sudden widening of her eyes, she now realized it.

Rubbing his thumb along her smooth inner wrist, he lowered his voice, easing his thigh between her legs. Not because he needed to do it to restrain her, but because he sensed that as much as she fought, she was not immune to him.

“Are we going to speak truth now? Or will I have to return you to your sire? I got a good look at him. Blue eyes, melted face, long-ass fangs.”

Her breathing hitched, and now instead of throbbing awareness, there was burning fear staring back at him from the depths of those exotically familiar amber eyes.

Releasing her wrist, he splayed his large hand against the base of her spine and pulled her farther into his body.

“You…you promised.”

“I promised you nothing, babe.”

“But…but you said, I tell you and you’ll give me a kn—”

His smile was full of teeth. “But you’ve given me nothing. All you do is sit and bristle like a ruffled porcupine. So tell me, what’s it going to be?”

Holding her so close, he felt the slight tremors coursing through her. Saw the way her big eyes held his look. She was terrified, but she wasn’t going to back down. Frenzy wondered if her panic was preventing her from really seeing the truth.

She was terrified of being sired to a vampire. But George had already told her she wasn’t. In her fury she’d obviously failed to register his words. But if she would just stop fighting a moment, she’d realize what was right in front of her.

Even her smell was different. Vampires smelled of traces of metal, of warm blood. Shifters smelled of warm earth, fallen leaves. Of the crisp scent of nature. She smelled of both. But maybe she wouldn’t know that, since a human’s sense of smell was pathetically limited, and though she’d obviously studied his kind, did the mortals know that each species carried their own scent? He doubted it.

George’s bite had definitely infected her, and the way she’d been eyeing the rodent…it wasn’t just for the blood that had now congealed inside its body.

It made him curious as to what she truly was. She was a very rare hybrid species; what were her limitations and strengths? He’d never heard of another vampire/shifter mix ever, since the two classes had a violent distaste for one another. What could she do? That was a mystery he desperately wanted to solve.

As she closed her eyes, he knew the fight had finally left her. Slumping in his arms, she nodded slowly. “You have to understand. This isn’t easy for me. I took an oath and I took it seriously. Telling you, it breaks every promise I ever made.”

Tucking a stray curl of hair behind her ear, he waited until her molten gaze met his before saying, “You died. That vow you made, it broke the moment it happened.”

A loud scraping, like metal on metal, raked through his ears. George was moving a small fold-out table into the center of the room.

“Dinner is served.” He spread his arms and, with a large smile, pointed at the charred remains of the body that no longer resembled a rodent so much as a black stick.

Grabbing two fold-out chairs, Frenzy jerked his chin to the one sitting in front of the blackened food. “Sit.”

Swallowing hard, Mila pulled the chair out and took a seat. She delicately toyed with the tip of the black lump in front of her.

“Eat it,” George whispered. “It’s okay, I cooked it.” His smile was full of crooked teeth.

“Clearly, it’s been a while since last you cooked, old friend.” Frenzy snorted.

Shrugging, the monk covered her hand with his own, his slightly bluer than hers. There were obvious differences between the two of them. Pale as she was, she still looked more alive than him. Not like a walking corpse full of veins and riddled with damage to the flesh.

Apart from the scars across her cheeks, she looked flawless. Frenzy’s heart raced.

“As I’ve tried to tell you before,” George said, “you are not sired. In fact, you are not even a vampire.”

That statement caused her brows to drop. “What?” Holding out her wrists, she rubbed her fingers along the smoothness of her flesh, along the places on her body that had been most savaged while the vampires had been on her. “They bit me. Everywhere. They turned me.” Touching one of her cheeks, she inhaled deeply. “They’ve ruined me.”

Ruin was a matter of debate. The scars were nothing to Frenzy; he’d seen worse, and in fact it gave her a macabre appeal he found oddly exciting. The flaws on her intrigued him in a way that the classic perfection of his kind failed to do.

“They’ll come looking for me. They’ll find me.”

“Without a sire bond, it will be next to impossible.” Frenzy tapped his fingers on the table. “Why do the vampires want you?” he asked again, trying to be patient, but his patience was definitely beginning to wear thin.

Jaw clenching, he read the internal debate waging in her head as clearly as if she’d spoken it aloud. Whatever she’d done in her previous life, the brainwashing had been absolute. Even in death she didn’t want to crack.

“Tell me how you know I’m not sired.” Her voice trembled.

“No.” He shook his head. “You first. No more games. Start talking.”

Closing her eyes for a second, she nodded. “But you’ll tell me what I need to know, right?”

Lifting a brow, he didn’t answer.

With a defeated sigh, she began. “Do you know what the CIA is?”

George looked blank, but Frenzy nodded. “A branch of your government?”

Wiggling her hand, she nodded. “Yes. An elite branch and incredibly secret. I’m not CIA, but I’m the equivalent of them. CIA deals with human threats, terrorism, drug cartels, gangland type of things. I do too, but with monsters instead of humans.”

He smiled, but it lacked warmth. “I’ve met Jack the Ripper, the Zodiac Killer—do not doubt that there are monsters within your kind as well.”

“Obviously. But that’s not the type of monster I was referring to.” She huffed impatiently. “I’m talking about the
others
. You guys.”

George cocked his head. “That is how you knew me on sight, and knew what Frenzy was?” He jerked his thumb at the reaper.

“Frenzy?” She said the name like a question, tasting it, sounding it out, and the way she did it made his pulse throb.

His name sounded good on her tongue. It’d been a long time since he’d indulged in the fantasy of being with a woman.

“Hmm.” Amber eyes narrowed into shrewd slits. “Why does that name sound so familiar?”

Shrugging, he continued to drum his fingers on the tabletop. “So you are a sect of humans studying us?” Getting the topic back to what was important, refusing to be distracted again. “To what purpose?”

“Just because San Francisco opened its borders to you guys, doesn’t mean that it’s going to just let you run roughshod on them. From the moment your kind stepped out of the closet, we’ve been keeping tabs.”

His gut told him they’d done more than just stay informed. “That’s not all you did. Tell the truth.” Setting his face into a hard, implacable mask, he stared her down, letting her know without words that he wasn’t playing.

Shifting in her seat, she picked at the charred remains of her dinner in front of her. “Look, we did what we had to do.”

“I haven’t walked this earth in some time.” Frenzy quirked a brow. “But I can tell that humans have grown more powerful. They have more knowledge of us than at any other point in history. How?”

Closing her eyes, a look of consternation flashed across her features. His question had hit a nerve and he couldn’t help but wonder why.

“Hmm?” he prompted, forcing her to stare at him again. “How are they learning so much? You knew I was a reaper before you even saw my hand. You knew George wasn’t merely a shifter, but that he was also a lone wolf—how?”

Scratching the back of her ear, she shrugged. “And this is why you found me as you did tonight. I’m very valuable.”

Nodding slowly, he perused her for any telltale sign of anxiety. It was much harder to spot on the undead. Where a human would be sweating or visibly shaken, she was cool and still as only a walking corpse could be. “How?”

“How what?” Her eyes were wide and without guile. It seemed to him she was being as honest as she could be, but he needed to make certain.

“How did humans learn of us? You have knowledge. How much? It’s not easy getting close to us. We tend to be a segregated bunch, preferring our own company as opposed to that of others. What did you do, little mortal? How did you get on the vampires’ radar?” Flinging one question after another at her, he waited to spot the cue. The giveaway that he’d hit on a nerve, but her demeanor didn’t falter.

“I’m a seer.”

George whistled. “And now it all makes so much sense.”

She nodded.

A seer was rare. Humans rarely held the gift; most of the gypsies and fortune-tellers he’d ever come across were nothing more than charlatans. The best he’d ever seen seemed to have a gut instinct when it came to reading a person’s emotions and drawing assumptions based off them. But a true seer, that was a precious commodity many of his kind would kill to possess.

“I don’t believe you.” He licked his incisors. “The lines are rare and few; in fact, so rare there are only two.”