Total pages in book: 145
Estimated words: 138274 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 691(@200wpm)___ 553(@250wpm)___ 461(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 138274 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 691(@200wpm)___ 553(@250wpm)___ 461(@300wpm)
“We do no die.” She punched his sternum. “They can stab in the chest and send us back, but we no die. Be careful. You get hurt bad, you stay like that until the stab—”
“It was just personal training.” He swallowed an urge to scream. “I was just trying to get strong—”
“You did. You feel more of it over the next day. You have strength like you cannot know, and you will use it to kill.”
The satisfaction threading through her voice revolted him. “I don’t want to kill anyone.”
He looked at his hands and the thought of the black blood on the floor, down his throat, coming out of his scratches…
Undead.
As a moan came out of his soul, he lifted his head. The woman had started walking again and was way down at the end of the alley, her duster flaring in her wake like she was the villain in a comic book.
He watched her take a left and disappear from sight.
Putting his hand to his heart, he felt a need to follow her. It was as if he had been summoned—and in all his confusion and terror, he had no reserves to override the tide. His feet got to walking again, and he followed once more the path that was before him, though he could not see it.
Around the corner he went, and down the next avenue he proceeded.
Others did the same.
As storm runoff hits a riverbed, so too did the street flood with a flow of men and women who were dressed in black and moving with the same purpose his body was. Falling in among their ranks, he looked around—whereas their heads never varied, their stares fixated on their destination.
Wherever that was.
Good thing his body knew the way.
He couldn’t see for the tears.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
As Nate nuzzled the side of her throat, Nalla was waiting for the strike. Breathlessly suspended on the sparkling charge between her and the fighter she was determined to feed, pinned down by his greater weight with his lower body resting between her open legs, she was live-wire present and floating off into a realm of sensation at the same time. And then she felt his fangs, sharp but not breaking her skin, ride up her vein. Moaning, she slipped her hands onto his back—
Instantly, her brain came awake in a bad way, the logical side of her restless and unsatisfied, even as her body was about to do what it had been made to do: There were just too many questions about Nate, and worse, no sense she was ever going to get any answers—
As she took a deep breath, dark spices filled her nose and yanked her out of that spiral.
Dear God, she had never smelled anything as enticing as the scent that flooded the room. His arousal was her favorite cologne.
Screw Gucci.
Arching up into him, she rolled her hips so that the hard ridge at her core stroked her in the right place, and the groan that rumbled out of him vibrated on her throat.
“Take my vein,” she said again.
There was a hiss and then his body went tight against her own, as if every muscle in his body tensed at once—
Nalla cried out as she felt the penetrations, the two pinpoints of sweet pain bringing her close to orgasm. And then there was the seal of his mouth and the sucking, as well as the primordial knowledge that she was giving him what he needed to be strong, to fight, to protect. His body required her. Without what she gave him, he was half of what he could be. After all, when the Scribe Virgin had used her one act of creation to bring vampires into existence, the mahmen of the species had made the sharing of blood a requirement of survival.
Until now, feeding had been an inconvenient need that Nalla had serviced in herself with awkward embarrassment or by using the same synthetic stuff Nate had no doubt been taking.
But there was no substitute for the real thing.
Riding up the muscles that fanned out from his spine, she found the nape of his neck, her short nails digging in. The locking-on juiced him further, and he repositioned the seal of his mouth, drawing even harder.
She hadn’t realized how dead she was until she felt this… alive.
And she wanted more.
Retracting her clawed hand, she pushed her arm between them, feeling the hard planes of his abdominals—before going lower still. The waistband of his leathers was a rough barricade that contrasted with the smooth skin under his belly button, and flattening her palm, she went even farther down—
The purr that rumbled through him was almost a growl, and it made her bold. Finding the hard length of his arousal, she stroked him over his leathers and imagined him inside her, filling her… coming as he sucked her blood and swallowed her down deep into his gut. And Nate was right with her. His hips helped her, pumping against her palm, and as the movement got faster with a tighter range, she knew if she kept this up he was going to orgasm.