Rise of the Fallen (6 page)

As she touched the antiseptic wipe to the jagged scrape on
the man's shoulder, the man's eyes shot open wide, his entire body contracting
violently as he growled – growled? Yes, he growled as his head snapped around.

Animalistic, navy blue eyes met hers, full of fear and
something else, something dark.

The rest happened so fast, Sam didn't have time to react.
His unbelievably strong hands latched onto her arm, pulled her wrist to his
mouth, and then fangs –
Fangs?
– pierced her skin as he bit her.

* * *

Micah had been in a semi-lucid state, aware of everything
going on around him but unable to rouse himself. He had felt the woman cut off
his shirt, had felt her sure, confident hands ranging his chest and torso
before her gentle fingers caressed his face. She had talked to him, too. Well,
not really to him, but sort of. Her voice was smooth and low, sultry. He just
wanted her to keep talking. The sound of her voice was a balm, an audible salve
to soothe his soul.

But then she had grown quiet and sucked in her breath. Micah
touched her mind and realized she had seen his self-mutilation. Shame flooded
him as his long-absent conscience reappeared, chastising him for what he had
done. For some reason, he didn't want this woman seeing the damage he had done
to his own arms.

And then everything shattered into white heat as fire stung
his shoulder.

Intense hunger raged like wildfire. Micah couldn't recall
ever needing to feed this badly. In an instant, his eyes flashed open and shot
to the woman tending him. Terror erupted in her expression, but all he could
see, think, feel, smell, and breathe was blood. Glorious, life-giving,
hunger-sating, Heaven-sent blood. With graceless impropriety, Micah yanked her
wrist to his mouth like it was a sandwich and he had gone way too long without
food then bit down with unceremonious impatience.

When was the last time he had truly fed?

The woman struggled as he locked his hands around her arm
and lurched upright with her wrist clenched in his mouth. Her blood flowed like
a river of life into his belly, and he moaned in ecstasy even as he fought to
restrain her. He had been too wrapped up in his need to feed to compel her into
submission, and she grappled, squirmed, and struggled against him, gasping and
protesting for him to stop.

Blood.
All he could think about was drinking her
blood. She swung at him with her free arm, kicking and trying to pull away, but
he stayed with her, using one hand to deflect her haphazard punches, turning
his body to avoid her kicks. All the while, his fangs kept her wrist locked in
his mouth and her blood spilling down his throat.

He finally overpowered her and bent her back and down to the
floor. Crouched like a man kneeling in prayer, his gaze ranged up her arm that
stretched between them, linking her to him like an umbilical cord as she
continued to struggle. His feral gaze locked onto the pools of clover green in
her eyes as his chest and abdomen heaved lustfully. Blood lust. Strong and pure
and all-consuming, it gnawed at him like a jackal on a bone.

The woman tried to cry out, but he slapped his hand over her
mouth, stifling her scream, taking his fill of her blood as her body finally
stilled beneath his.

It was only then that Micah realized she was crying. Tears
streamed her cheeks as horrific sobs convulsed her chest. As his senses ebbed
back into him, he gently lifted his hand from her mouth, keeping it close in
case she tried to scream again.

"Please, please stop. Don't kill me."

Her fear smelled like sulfur as the words clubbed him. Kill
her? He didn't want to kill her.

Where was he, anyway?

Micah's eyes flitted around the room and suddenly it was
clear he wasn't in Kansas, anymore. What was this place? He had never been here
before. Nothing was familiar. How had he gotten here? His eyes darted back to
hers.

After releasing her wrist with a gasp, Micah fell back like
he had just seen Jesus wagging a judgmental finger at him, and he ass-planted
on her generic beige carpeting.

"Where am I?" he said.

The woman trembled in fear, too afraid to move as she
clutched her bleeding wrist to her body. In his confusion, he had forgotten to
release the dose of venom that would heal the bite.

"Where am I?" Micah's voice rose urgently as he
frowned in dazed confusion.

"M-My a-apartment." The woman was shivering.

"What's your name?"

She paused like she was trying to decide whether or not she
should tell him.

"Tell me!" He was freaking out.

The woman jumped. "S-Sam."

"Why am I here, Sam?"

The woman frowned at him like his question confused her.

"Why am I here?!" Why did he have to repeat
everything to get her to answer?

She flinched. "You were hurt. I helped you. D-don't you
remember?"

Everything flooded back into Micah's mind with such force he
visibly wobbled as if he was in the ocean and a wave of storm surge had just
rolled over him. He even sucked in his breath as if he was sinking underwater.

He remembered. Jackson, his fall into misery, his death
wish, the drecks beating the shit out of him in that parking garage tonight.
And then the crack of a gunshot and a woman's voice, followed by an image of…

"It was you." Micah's awed words whispered out of
him as he sat back. She was the woman who had saved his life, even though he
had only wanted death.

"Yeah. It was me, you asshole. I saved your life."
Her fear morphed into anger.

Sam was a tough little doll. Micah approved.

"What the hell are you and what did you do to me?"
She held out her bleeding wrist. Her expression was half terror, half outrage,
and her mind seemed to be dancing over the question of what in the hell she had
sitting on her floor in the middle of her apartment.

Micah had screwed up, but he had been so delirious with
agony and hunger he hadn't been thinking clearly. He had failed to compel her,
and he could feel dawn's approach. He was never this careless.

"What time is it?" He looked around for a clock,
knowing he needed to get home. Fast.

"What?" Sam shook her head as if she couldn't keep
up with him. "Are you on drugs? Are you one of those weirdos with a
vampire fantasy who went and got his teeth altered?"

Finding a clock and seeing he only had 15 minutes before
daybreak, Micah had to move fast. Sam's blood was already making him stronger,
and he could feel his injuries healing quickly.

"Look at me," he said.

She refused, but when he tenderly lifted her wrist to his
mouth and licked her skin to coat the bite mark with his venom, her eyes
snapped to his. Just as quickly, she sucked in her breath as the euphoria
entered her bloodstream. It wasn't enough venom to harm her, just enough to
take away the pain of his bite and heal the punctures. Normally, he would have
released the venom during the bite so that when he broke away, the mark would
heal instantly. Being that he had been so clumsy, this was the best he could
do.

He captured her gaze and she fell limp as he locked her into
compulsion. Filtering through her memories, he was about to pull the plug on
everything that had to do with him when his heart skipped a beat at the way she
had reacted to the touch of his tongue on her wrist. The subtle intake of
breath and the surprised look in her eyes, as if she couldn't deny her
attraction to him, awakened him.

God, she was beautiful. Full of fire, strong, courageous.
Micah's kind of woman.

He caressed her cheek with the backs of his fingers as if
she was made of fine porcelain, and her warmth rippled through his hand.

He couldn't do it. Micah couldn't strip away her memories of
him. He wanted her to remember him, so the next time he saw her, she would know
him. The bite memories would have to go, though. He quickly dashed anything
that had to do with fangs and him biting her, but left everything else.

The healing bruises of his body protested as he lifted her
off the floor and laid her gently down on the bed then stood over her for a
moment to memorize her. She had short – almost boy-short – blond hair that
stood out in stylish, feminine spikes like she'd combed and plucked it with her
fingers. With a heart-shaped face and a daintily-pointed chin, her skin was
smooth and flawless, her body slender and athletic. She looked like a runner,
her stomach flat and her breasts small but perky under a rose-colored,
long-sleeved cotton tee.

"That's a good color on you," he said quietly,
staring at her a little longer before checking the clock. He had to hurry.

"Sleep, Sam," he commanded her. "And remember
me."

On his way out, he paused as her duffel bag caught his eye.
A gun was poking out through the top. He reached down and pulled out a nice
looking Beretta. That was some hardware for a pretty thing like her. He glanced
back at her prone form on the bed and smiled then put the Beretta back in the
bag and pulled out her wallet. Samantha Garrett. That was the name on her
driver's license. He looked at her again. "I'll be seeing you, Samantha
Garrett." He dropped her wallet back in her bag and hurried out.

After gathering his bearings, he dematerialized to his
apartment. He hated dematerializing. It always left him disoriented afterward,
so he only used the nifty vampire trick when he had to.

As soon as his feet hit the balcony and he stepped inside,
he realized that thoughts of Jackson no longer filled his mind. Jackson's
memory was still there, and Micah still ached, but those thoughts no longer
chained him to a cannon ball that was dropping into the depths of hell. Micah
actually felt okay. He felt like things were going to be all right. The agony
seemed to be lifting. He no longer felt the need to mar his flesh to take away
the pain, because, well, the pain was merely an echo compared to what it had
been just a few hours ago.

In a stunned daze, Micah wandered into the kitchen as the
computerized timers engaged the double set of heavy, opaque drapes to close along
the dual tracks over the windows.

Standing with his hands pressed against the counter, head
down, Micah thought back over the last couple of weeks and wondered what he was
supposed to do now? With an angry rumble, his stomach answered.
Eat.
Fuck, he was famished.

* * *

Down below, the guardian materialized into the shadows and
looked up at the eighteenth floor. Back at the human woman's house, he had been
ready to bust in her door and yank Micah out when Micah had walked out on his
own and dematerialized back home. The guardian didn't know what had happened
between Micah and the woman, but whatever it was had been good, because the
guardian could feel Micah finally eating again, which was something he hadn't
done in two weeks.

One thing was certain: The human female was a spitfire. The
guardian had just come across Micah's trail, which led into a parking garage,
when he heard gunshots. Five drecks took off out of the garage then the blonde
dragged Micah to her car a couple minutes later. She was strong, both in body
and spirit, that much he could tell. Micah had been in and out of
consciousness, but that woman had muscled him to her car like a pro.

The guardian could have interfered, but his curiosity had
held his hand. He had been intrigued and wanted to know more about this woman,
so he had followed her home, where she slung Micah over her shoulder like a
soldier and hefted him inside. The guardian had felt her caring hands inspect
Micah, then all hell broke loose as he felt Micah take her blood.

And thank God for that, because Micah hadn't fed in two
weeks, either. To know he was eating
and
feeding eased the guardian's
mind, and he grinned for the first time since his watch over Micah had begun.
Whatever had gone on in that woman's apartment had changed Micah for the
better. The feel-good emotions coming from the eighteenth floor told the
guardian that much.

As the first rays of sun kissed the eastern horizon, the
guardian bundled his coat collar around his neck and dematerialized to his own
home. Micah would be fine. Now maybe the guardian could think about working on
phase two of Project Micah.

The next night, Arion and Severin went to Jackson's
apartment.

"I hope he's home," Arion said, walking
side-by-side with Severin down the hall of the luxury apartment building where
Jackson lived.

"Or that he hasn't moved." Severin folded a stick
of gum into his mouth.

"Got a piece for me?"

"Sure." Severin held the pack of gum out for him
so he could swipe a piece.

Arion checked the door number as he bit down on the stick of
spearmint gum and stopped in front of apartment 9-D. "Yeah, I hope he
hasn't moved, too." The address was a year old, after all.

They had scrounged Jackson's address out of the database at
AKM the night before, but had to delay the trip over because the sun was coming
up and, unlike Severin, Arion couldn't go out in the sun. Since newbies like
Sev weren't allowed to hit the field without a veteran along for the ride, they
had postponed their outing until tonight. Tristan hadn't been pleased about
that, but what could they do?

Sev's gaze automatically ranged the hall as if he was
looking for traps or hidden dangers. Decades pulling military duty alongside
the humans as a day walker had likely created a few habits that would never be
broken. Ari could only imagine the life Severin was rumored to have lived
fighting alongside humans in generation-after-generation of wars.

Giving the heavy door some knuckle action, Arion leaned
against the doorframe, sizing Sev up.

"So, you were a SEAL?" Ari said.

"Yep."

"Impressive. And you can really go out in the daylight,
huh?"