Chapter Twenty-Six
A familiar, intoxicating aroma flooded into Breen’s nose and slammed him awake. He popped his lids open and gulped a breath, his blood-need instantly propelling into a full, voracious hunger.
Charlize.
She was standing at the foot of his hospital bed, dressed in a form-fitting white T-shirt and a pleated gray miniskirt that showed off the sexy length of her runner’s legs. The morning light coming in through the blinds highlighted her abundance of glossy blond curls.
His fangs reacted instantly to her, looking so beautiful and exuding the best scent in all the world. And he’d thought he needed more of Charlize last night, when Pettrila was in his room. The sensations he just woke up to—his pale green hospital pajamas soaked with sweat and his tongue feeling like poster putty—signaled a screaming blood-need.
“How are you feeling, Breen?”
Charlize’s lips hadn’t moved. She wasn’t the one who’d spoken. She was just staring at him, mute and motionless. Was the sight of him in a hospital bed, one leg bandaged—his right pajama pant cut away to make room—reminding her of the lake of blood she’d seen in the garage, a sight she’d found so upsetting she fainted.
Please don’t do that again. He hadn’t liked it.
“Are you hungry?”
He recognized Toni’s voice. She’d asked the question—this one and the one before.
“Um…” There wasn’t much in his head that was currently fit for out-loud speech. Not with thoughts of feeding on Charlize waking up other parts of his body. He lived in a constant state of horny these days, but when he fed on Charlize that got jacked to teeth-shivering heights of lust. Anticipating her taste was giving him a serious case of morning wood.
Something squeezed Breen’s arm, and he glanced over.
Hadley was at his bedside, taking his blood pressure. He hadn’t noticed her, either. He was really zeroed in on Charlize. He gave the room a quick scan. No Nurse Shaston, which was good. She still hadn’t forgiven him for all the shit he’d done to her to escape his half-bond. No Dr. Jess.
“One hundred twenty over eighty,” Hadley announced. She removed the cuff while keeping her eyes averted from the area below his waist.
Man, he was going to start giving poor Hadley a complex if he kept popping boners around her.
Toni nodded, apparently satisfied with his blood pressure numbers, and wrote it on his medical chart. Strands of hair had escaped a disheveled topknot on Toni’s head and lay in straggly threads around her face. Exhaustion circled her eyes in raccoon black, making her look totally beat up. She’d probably been working around the clock—all the medical staff had—considering the number of wounded that cycled through Ţărână’s hospital yesterday.
He pressed a button on his bed frame. A motor hummed, and he rose with the bed into a sitting position. “How’s Dev?”
“Good,” Toni answered. “Sleeping a lot. Feeding a lot. It’ll take several days for him to reform all the skin on his back, but he’s getting there. Marissa, of course, is relentlessly pampering him.”
“He’s already home?”
Toni snorted softly. “He went straight home from the garage. He didn’t want to tie up a hospital bed.”
“Can I go home?” Last time he’d been in the hospital, he was shackled to a bed and going through a brutal half-bond. Not good memories.
“Probably later today.” Toni glanced over at the other bed.
Skunk Streak was stirring.
“Hadley,” Toni said, “please let Pettrila know her brother is waking.”
“Of course.” Hadley headed for the door, rolling the blood pressure cuff into a ball as she went.
“I’m going to order you a post-surgery liquid breakfast.” Toni wrote on Breen’s chart again, flashing him an amused look when she added, “That means Jell-O, broth, and tea are in your future. Yum.”
“Uh, yeah, I’m hungry, but, you know.” He cast a sideways glance at Charlize. “Not necessarily for food.”
Toni slotted his chart. “Of course.” She gestured at Charlize. “That’s why she’s here.”
Pettrila arrived, Hadley reentering behind her.
The room went quiet, full only of the whoosh of a heater.
Brother and sister stared at each other. Both of them had dark amber eyes.
Skunk Streak hummed his bed up, too, and finally broke the silence, his voice weighted with emotion. “Pe toți sfinții! Cum e posibil să fii în viață? Nu pot să cred—”
“I don’t understand Romanian anymore,” Pettrila interrupted.
They stared at each other again.
An orderly strolled by out in the hall, whistling tunelessly.
Breen shifted in his bed. Even his feet were sweating.
“My dear Octav…” Pettrila’s gaze darkened. “How on earth are you alive? I saw your ship sink.”
Octav’s lips slanted. “That is what I just asked you in Romanian.” He exhaled softly. “I wasn’t on any of the ships, Pettrila. A group of us never boarded in Constanţa Harbor. We refused to be driven from our homeland by the Vârcolac Vânător.”
Both of Pettrila’s perfectly plucked brows went up.
The Vârcolac Vânător, or vampire hunters, were groups of civilian fighters organized in Romania in the 1800s to protect the population from the “evil” of vampires. Vampires had lived in peaceful obscurity in Romania for centuries before that, but sentiment changed when an overly ambitious Russian general invented horrific rumors about vampires so he could obliterate them for his own benefit. Eventually the Vârcolac Vânător proved so lethally effective that in 1887 all Vârcolac were forced to evacuate the country of their birth…or so everyone thought.
Four nights ago, in the abandoned Lakeside house, when Breen saw another person with a set of fangs—impossible for anyone outside of Ţărână—he’d been shocked immobile.
Pettrila drew herself up and gave her brother a critical look. “You never said anything to me about your plans.”
“It was a profound secret. Only one man knew of our intentions. Stanislav Lazăr. He was to be our emergency liaison in England, should we have needed one. By fate’s good fortune, Stanislav was onboard one of the two ships that survived the Russian attack. But—” Octav’s upper lip curled—“he ended up forging off on his own and so proved useless. We were never able to contact anyone of our own kind again.”
Pettrila stood in silence.
Maybe if Breen said this convo would be so much better outside they would go.
Octav’s expression softened. “I also didn’t want to risk interfering with your future plans, Pettrila. You were set to go to England with Ştefan Dragoş, marry him, and start anew.”
Color rose in Pettrila’s cheeks. She looked away.
“But…you…” Octav’s tone thickened. “I don’t understand…did you truly bond with Grigore Nichita?”
The blush on Pettrila’s face darkened. She said tonelessly, “Grigore convinced me it was Ştefan Dragoş who betrayed our race.”
Octav’s brows flashed down. “And you believed him?”
Pettrila’s chest moved. “Right before we were due to set sail on the armada, Ştefan sent me a letter, tossing me aside for another woman.” The smile Pettrila brought up was brittle. “After that, I’m afraid it was quite easy for Grigore to manipulate me into viewing the evidence his way. Only a mere four years ago did I discover Grigore forced Ştefan to write that letter. For the rest of nearly a hundred years, I thought Ştefan never loved me.”
Octav’s eyes went back and forth across his sister’s.
Pettrila clasped her hands at her waist, the skin across her knuckles stretching taut. “I was injured in the Constanţa sea battle during our escape and needed to feed. No blood donors were on my ship. Grigore was. I bonded with him.” Her nostrils quivered almost imperceptibly. “Ştefan had thrown me over, you were dead—I watched your ship sink—leaving me without any family. So what did it matter?”
The lines at the corners of Octav’s eyes lengthened. He slumped back on his bed and turned to stare out the window. “It hasn’t been a good life,” he said quietly.
“No.” The hands Pettrila had clasped at her waist switched positions, top to bottom, bottom to top. “I lost four daughters to a cave collapse some years ago. And now I almost lost a son to…”
Breen looked down and fiddled with the strings on his pajama bottoms. Now his fingers were sweating.
“What you did to Devid, Octav…” Pettrila trailed off again and shook her head. Apparently, the mother had feelings for the son she was estranged from.
Octav turned toward his sister again, the tendons on his neck flexing. “It hasn’t been a good life for me, either, Pettrila. Too many enemies to contend with in Romania, too much fighting, so much death.”
“The Vârcolac Vânător—”
“We had troubles with them, yes, but, mostly we have suffered from constant war with the three other factions living within the warded lands.”
Pettrila frowned. “Warded lands? We always brushed those aside as being no more than a legend.”
“They exist,” Octav corrected. “Ştefan Dragoş led us to the special area in the Carpathian Mountains after those of us who decided to stay in Romania helped him fire cannons at the Russian frigates attacking the armada—and we helplessly watched your ship sink. Dragoş couldn’t bring himself to stay in Transylvania without you, so he remained only long enough to help us lure several Solomonori to our side, then he moved to New York.”
Breen snapped his focus away from Charlize’s legs when Toni tried to exchange a glance with him. Warded lands…Solomonori… Yeah, the conversation between brother and sister was off-roading into the bizarre, but…Charlize had really cute creases behind her knees.
“For these many long years,” Octav went on, “I have tried to keep my people sheltered from the outside world, but it came to pass that our own small corner of the mountains proved the most devastating. The Creaturi Care-și Schimbă Forma, Dragoni Autentici, and the Vrăjitoare Războinice—”
Pettrila raised a hand. “Now you’re not making sense, Octav.”
Octav smiled vaguely. “The three other factions: The Shapechangers, the Pure Dragons, and the Warrior Witches. Otherwordly beings, like Vârcolac.”
Toni jumped in now. “Pure Dragons? I thought that race had gone extinct.”
Octav gave her an unfriendly look before answering. “They still exist in the warded lands, although Vârcolac don’t interbreed with Dragons anymore.” He assessed Toni critically. “Not like you people clearly do.”
“Of course we do,” Toni countered. “The Dragon bloodlines helped to stabilize the vampire population when Vârcolac first started having genetic problems. Why would you stop interbreeding with them?”
“They became enemies,” Octav answered simply.
“Has it affected your genetics?”
Breen nearly crossed his eyes. Now he had to listen to a discussion on genetics? This was so damned ridiculous, he was starting to imagine himself sticking his thumb in his mouth and straining real hard until he exploded all over everyone. They’d get the fuck out of his room then, right?
Octav’s mouth turned down. “I suppose so, yes. Most of the men have re-assumed more ancient, purer traits: they grow facial hair late, have a different activation to their Pure-bred eyes, and possess hunting vision. Unfortunately, all of our women are infertile.” Octav smoothed the blanket over his lap with a rough sweep of his hand. “We have become the weakest faction, second only to the Shapechangers.”
“Shapechangers?”
“Were-creatures. Wolves, bears, various large jungle cats, living in packs. Ever since Zalina stole their ability to change from their human shape to their animal form, they have suffered greatly.”
“Who’s Zalina?”
“She is leader of the Războinic Vrăjitoare, or Warrior Witches. This is the largest, wickedest, and most powerful of the factions. After we Vârcolac arrived, the Patru Puternic, or the Mighty Four, was created. The original idea behind uniting was for us to help each other against our common enemy: regular humans. But Zalina’s lust to conquer us all has kept us struggling to outdo one another. Creaturi care-și schimbă forma, Şarpe Pursânge, Războinic Vrăjitoare, Călăreţii Lunii—we all do nothing but fight.”
Faint lines creased Toni’s brow. “Călăreţii Lunii? Who’s that?”
“Vârcolac.” Octav patted his chest. “It is the title the others have given us due to the vampire ability to harness and control the power of the moon.” Octav scanned everyone’s faces.
Everyone stared back blankly.
“Călăreţii Lunii,” Octav repeated then clarified, “Moon-Riders.”