Night Huntress 06 - Eternal Kiss of Darkness (2 page)

The ghoul snarled at the insult, hacking a deep line in Mencheres’s thigh as a response. Another ghoul took hold of Mencheres’s waist-length black hair and sawed a hunk of it off at the shoulder.

Mencheres’s anger rose again, dark and deadly, seeking to merge with his power to be given form. He forced it back, knowing if he released his control for even an instant, all of the ghouls would die. And they hadn’t served their purpose yet.

“Put the knives
down
and get away from him,” someone gasped.

Mencheres swung his gaze toward the sound with the same amazement the ghouls showed. Had he been so distracted by his own thoughts—and the ghouls by their torture—that a
human
had actually managed to sneak up on them?

The proof stood on the other side of the room, posture in a classic shooting stance, gun pointed at the ghouls clustered around him. The woman’s eyes were wide, her face pale, but she held her weapon in an unwavering grip.

This
was a complication he didn’t need.

“Leave now,” Mencheres ordered. Her warm mortal body would be too tempting for the flesh-eaters to resist if she didn’t flee at once.

“Well, well,” Stakes drew out, leaving his knife embedded in Mencheres’s thigh. “Look here, guys. Dessert.”

A clicking sound indicated the woman’s thumbing back the hammer. “I’ll shoot,” she warned. “All of you, put your knives down and get away from him. The police are already on the way…”

Her voice cracked as Stakes moved away from Mencheres. Most of what they’d done to him had been blocked from her view by the ghoul’s body, but when Mencheres was fully revealed to the woman’s gaze, she stared.

The ghouls charged.

Mencheres knew he should do nothing. Should stay lashed to the building’s support beam, pretending to be helpless, and let the ghouls kill her. After all, he’d had an objective when he set out to this place, and it didn’t involve saving a reckless human.

But in the single second that it took the ghouls to reach the woman, another thought rose within Mencheres, overcoming his practicality. She’d tried to save him. He could not let her die for it.

Power ripped out of him, slamming into the ghouls. The bloodied ropes around Mencheres began to unwind themselves, whipping about like snakes as Mencheres blasted more of his power into the six ghouls. The strikes were weaker than normal from his blood loss, but the sudden high-pitched shrieks coming from the flesh-eaters ended as abruptly as their attack on her. By the time the ropes all fell away, and Mencheres strode over to the woman, none of the ghouls could even move.

Mencheres kicked Stakes of out the way to reveal the woman underneath him. She was gasping, blood coming from her mouth in a thin trail, more pouring from the gaping wound in her stomach. His hesitation had been costly. The ghoul managed to wound her mortally before he’d stopped him. In mere minutes, the woman would bleed to death.

She stared up at him, anguish showing in her expression, followed by a horrified understanding as she glanced down at her stomach.

“Tina,” the woman whispered. Then her pale green eyes rolled back into her head, and she passed out.

Mencheres didn’t pause this time; he sliced his fangs across his wrist and held the wound to her mouth. No blood flowed. Of course—the ghouls had drained all his blood. He swept the woman up in the next instant, taking her to the pole he’d so recently been lashed to. Then Mencheres scooped up a handful of blood that pooled on the floor, forcing it into her mouth. Her pulse was now erratic, her breathing almost nonexistent, but he ignored that, making her swallow.

Sirens approached. The police were almost here, just as she said they would be. Mencheres scooped up another handful of his blood, rubbing it onto the gouge in her stomach. The woman’s hot blood mingled with his, but only for a moment. Then her bleeding stopped, the edges of her flesh pulling toward each other as she began to heal inside and out from the regenerative effects of his blood.

Two car doors slammed. Mencheres left her on the red-smeared floor while he went over to the ghouls. Their eyes were the only things that could move as he stared down at them.

“If you had killed me at once, you might have lived another few days,” Mencheres said coldly. Then he flexed his power in a short, controlled burst. A popping sound preceded six heads rolling away from the ghouls’ bodies in the next moment.

Footsteps approached the warehouse. Mencheres paused, glancing over at the woman. She’d regained consciousness, and she was staring at him, her pale gaze riveted with shock and horror.

She had seen his fangs. Watched him kill the ghouls. She knew too much for him to leave her here.

“Police,” a voice called out. “Anyone injured in here?”

Mencheres snatched up the woman and flew out of a broken window before the officers had a chance to gasp at the carnage they found inside.

K
ira knew she wasn’t dreaming, or hallucinating, or crazy. And that was the bad news. It meant everything she’d seen was real, which meant the man who’d kidnapped her couldn’t be human. As impossible as the notion was, it was the only logical explanation. Humans couldn’t recover from the butchery she’d seen when she’d gotten her first clear look at the man lashed to that pole. Humans didn’t have fangs or eyes that glowed fluorescent green. And humans couldn’t
tear people’s heads off
without even touching them.

Even if she wanted to rationalize that all of the above had been her hysterical misinterpretation of a traumatic event, humans sure as hell couldn’t fly. Yet her kidnapper had flown away from that warehouse, then performed several impossible roof-to-roof leaps while holding her as if she weighed nothing.

Kira had always been afraid of heights, so that fear, combined with dizziness, shock, blood loss, and vertigo, proved too much. At some point during the roof-jumping, she passed out. Now she found herself awake in a very normal-looking bedroom, still in her ripped, blood-spattered clothes, her stomach wound miraculously healed and her kidnapper sitting in a chair across from the bed.

“Do not fear, you are safe,” were his first words, spoken in an oddly accented voice.

Only Kira’s survival instincts kept her from saying, “Bull
shit.
” She glanced down at herself, but of course, her gun was nowhere to be seen. Not that it would have done any good against whatever he and the other creatures at the warehouse were.

“Where am I?” Kira asked, edging out from underneath the covers someone—he?—had pulled over her.

“A safe place,” her kidnapper replied, eliciting another mental scoff from Kira. Sure. She was as safe as a skydiver with a broken parachute.

“How strange,” the man murmured in the next moment. “I can smell your fear, but I can’t hear a word of it.”

Kira had been in the process of slowly edging out of the bed, but at that, she stopped. A cold thrill of adrenaline washed over her as she took her first real look at the person holding her captive.

Straight black hair hung well past his chest in some places, but was hacked to his shoulders in others. At first glance, his features looked Middle Eastern, but his light skin made her think mixed heritage. A wide mouth was curled in a slight half smile while black brows hung over equally black eyes. Where had that previous unearthly green glow gone? He looked to be in his midtwenties, judging from the lack of lines around his eyes. He still had blood spattered on his neck, but it looked like he’d put on a fresh shirt and pants. If not for the blood and the unevenly shorn hair, Kira would think him a young, suave executive if she’d run into him on the subway.

But she’d seen him sliced half to pieces just this morning, though no sign of injury was visible on him now. It was even more proof that whatever he was, it couldn’t be human.

Why bother with pleasantries?
Kira wondered. Both of them knew she’d witnessed something that would probably result in her being killed so she couldn’t tell anyone about it.

“Fascinating,” he said, almost to himself. “I cannot hear a
word
of what you’re thinking.”

Kira’s hands instinctively went to her head, as if she could physically block him from trying to peer in her mind. His half smile quirked.

“That would do you no good under normal circumstances, but as I said, I cannot hear your thoughts.”

“What are you?” she blurted. An alien? She knew the government was lying about that Roswell incident…

“Nothing you need to worry about, Tina,” he replied with a shrug. “Soon, you can—”

“Why did you call me Tina?” Kira interrupted in a panicked whisper.

“Perhaps I just need more blood,” the stranger muttered.

“You stay
away
from my sister,” Kira snarled, rising. Whatever he was, he’d run from the police. That meant they must be able to hurt him, and if he had anything planned that involved Tina, she’d find a way to hurt him, too.

He held out a hand. “You misunderstand. You said ‘Tina’ right before you lost consciousness earlier. I thought it was your name.”

Kira didn’t remember that, but it made sense. When she saw how horrible her injury was, her last thought had been that no one else would be around to take care of Tina once she was dead. A wound like that should have killed her, yet the first thing Kira had noticed upon waking was that her stomach was healed. Incredibly, no mark even remained, and she felt fine, though her clothes were still torn and stained crimson with blood.

That made her give her kidnapper another slow evaluation.
He
must have healed her somehow. Did that mean he was being truthful when he said she was in no danger, or did this creature have something even worse in store for her? If he had no malicious intentions, why hadn’t he left her at the warehouse with the police?

The dark stranger sat motionless, that single hand still extended toward her. Kira took a deep breath and sat back on the bed. She’d been in enough strange situations with her job to know that getting hysterical never helped anyone. True, nothing about being a private investigator had prepared her for
this
, but if she wanted to preserve even the smallest chance at surviving, she needed to keep her cool.

“My name is Kira.” If he’d taken her belongings, he’d soon know that from her wallet, anyway. “I want to go home now. I’m not sure what happened this morning. When I try to remember, it’s all so blurry…”

“You are lying,” the man said with a scoff that somehow managed to sound elegant. Those coal-colored eyes narrowed. “I don’t need to read your mind to know that. I can smell it.”

Kira swallowed hard. “Wouldn’t you pretend you didn’t remember anything, if you were in my position?”

“I don’t know,” he replied almost musingly. “I’ve never been in your position. I always knew about Cain’s children, even when I was a child myself.”

Then he shook his head as if to clear it. “Why am I saying this to you? I
must
need to feed again. Come, let us get this over with…”

He was suddenly in front of her, his hands on her shoulders. How could he have moved so
fast
? Her heart began to pound while a sick franticness welled up in her.
Get this over with?
Was that how casually he referred to murdering her?

“Do not fear,” the monster said softly. His eyes changed, glowing a terrible bright green as he forced her to look at him. Pressure began to build in her mind. Oh God, he was about to rip her head off, like he’d done to those other creatures back at the warehouse.

“Stop it,” Kira gasped. “I tried to help you—”

“I know,” he interrupted, brushing his fingers across her face. “It was very brave. Foolish, too, but brave nonetheless. Look into my eyes, Kira.
Nothing happened this morning.
You never went to the warehouse. You never saw me. You went home, fell asleep, and nothing else happened…”

His voice deepened until it vibrated with something more than his unusual accent. The pressure in Kira’s mind intensified, but her head didn’t feel like it was about to snap off her shoulders. Maybe he wasn’t trying to kill her. It hadn’t taken this long for him to kill the others at the warehouse. After several more moments staring into his impossibly bright eyes, Kira tried to reason with him again.

“That’s exactly what I’ll say. Whatever you are, whatever they were, I don’t want to know about it. I just want to forget about it.”

A frown creased his features. “Impossible,” he muttered. His eyes brightened even more. “Nothing happened this morning. You walked home, you went to bed…”

“Got it,” Kira said, blinking. Looking into his eyes was like staring into two green spotlights.

He was on the other side of the room before her next blink, looking at her with the same wary speculation she’d bestowed on him before.

“You are immune to my power.” A short laugh came from him. “This is a memorable day, indeed. Perhaps it’s because I gave you my blood to heal you. That could interfere with my mesmerizing you now. Once you get it out of your system, you will be susceptible again.”

That didn’t sound good. It sounded lengthy, like she wasn’t getting away anytime soon, and things were forming a connection in her mind.
Blood. Mesmerizing. Fangs. Flying
. Only one creature had all those in common, but this stranger couldn’t really be a
vampire
, could he?