Eternal Kiss of Darkness

"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.

Chapter 2

Kira 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 thril 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 Roswel 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?