Chapter One
Sonya
Caught up in the moment as I was, I didn’t see fate coming for me. I should have. There were signs. Like the animalistic growl rumbling in his chest as he kissed a wet line down my jaw to my neck. I wasn’t about to protest. The primal sound of it was sexy as hell. His incredible amber eyes developed a shine about them that seemed unnatural, but I figured that was the drinks we’d had earlier getting to me. His hips ground against mine, pushing me into the door to my downstairs apartment.
Again he asked to go inside, and again I refused. He was attractive enough, and I certainly had nothing against premarital sex, but casual sex was another thing altogether. Especially with a guy I had only met two weeks ago. It was bad enough that we were making out in the dark alley in front of my low-income apartment where my sketchy neighbors could come out at any moment. But then, Twin Falls, Idaho, wasn’t exactly a hopping town after midnight. And seeing as my apartment building was only a little two-story number that housed less than fifty, the odds of anyone being around were slim to none. All the more reason not to go inside where temptation would lead me somewhere I wasn’t willing to go yet.
The gentle nips at my neck grew harder. Walking that razor edge of pleasure/pain made my blood pump so hard the cool Idaho night felt more like Arizona in the midst of summer. Until impossibly sharp teeth grazed the sensitive skin of my neck.
“Ouch!”
Those teeth broke through my skin and sank deep into the muscles and meat of my neck. I screamed and writhed in pain but he had locked onto me with the strength of a boa constrictor. After an excruciating few seconds, his teeth withdrew from me in a rush.
One moment he was pressed against me, the next he leaped back and stood against the building across the alley as if using it to brace himself. His mouth hung open and within it, not one set of fangs shone in the streetlight, but two. A set on the top and a set on the bottom, much like a canine. The worst part; they were covered in my blood. My blood.
“What the hell?” I yelled, a hand going to my neck.
My fingers came away slick and sticky with blood. He stood there, staring at me with those gleaming eyes, blood trickling over his bottom lip. Slowly, like a cat’s claws, his fangs retracted until they looked like no more than overly pointy teeth. Before tonight I had thought his toothy smile looked sexy. Now, not so much. If it weren’t for the blood making a steady trail down his chin, I would have thought I’d imagined the whole thing. Then there was the pain.
Keeping my eyes on him, I fumbled in my pocket for my keys while the other searched for the mace I kept on me. My fingers settled around the metal canister. Hand so steady it surprised even me, I took it out, flicked my thumb under the safety cap, and pointed it at him. The bastard just grinned. A cold chill of fear threatened to extinguish my anger.
“What. The. Hell?” I demanded slower, emphasizing each word, desperate to hang on to the anger that gave me courage.
His shoulders sagged, his defined chest caving in on itself as if he were trying to melt back into the wall. The button-up shirt he wore lay splayed open, giving me a good view of the blood that dripped from his chin onto his pale pecs. Only moments ago I had opened that shirt in my eagerness to touch his bare flesh. The memory made me shiver with revulsion. That gorgeous, fit body of his suddenly seemed to sport more hair than I remembered. Hair covered his bare chest where I didn’t recall him having any before, and the line of it from his belly button down into the waistband of his jeans had definitely thickened. The hand holding the mace began to shake, and I loathed myself a little for the weakness. He looked past the mace at me with something close to contempt.
“I’m sorry it had to be like this. I didn’t want it to, I swear,” he said.
Straightening, he adjusted the erection pushing against the fly of his jeans, taking his time as if I weren’t pointing mace at his half-naked body. The front step swam a bit. Damn, how deep had he bitten into me? I pressed one hand to the wound and kept the mace trained on him with the other. Freaked out and feeling exposed, I wanted nothing more than to dig my keys out of my jeans pocket and open my apartment door, but I didn’t dare. Dropping my guard even a little wasn’t an option.
Hot, sticky blood oozed through my fingers and ran down my neck. “You bit me, you son of a bitch!”
Going stiff, he stood up straighter, eyes darting down the alley in both directions. The alley swam, and not in a pleasant, too-much-Jack-Daniels kind of way.
“Get away from me, Raul. Now,” I said, doing my best to sound like the badass I totally did not feel like at the moment.
Soft yellow light from headlights outlined his spiky brown hair. Someone had parked at the other end, beyond the small bit of green space that edged the building. When the lights didn’t switch off, I realized whoever it was wanted to see us. I called out for help. The blinding bright light hid Raul’s expression from me until he turned his back to it. Damned if he didn’t look a bit smug—and beneath it, worried. The second part I liked; the first made me even more concerned than I already was.
He started down the sidewalk, moving away from the headlights. “See you soon, doll,” he said in a sexy tone that made me want to vomit.
The headlights bounced off the green thread of the top rocker sewn to his black Cordura jacket. No matter how many times I had asked, he’d never told me what AVW—stitched onto the top rocker—stood for. The bottom rocker read Montana, revealing he belonged to some kind of group out of that state. Beyond that, I knew very little. Between the rockers sat a patch with strange symbols of circling knotwork woven into the shape of a canine with Norse runes all around it. That told me even less. Damn it, I should have known better.
“Not a chance, you freak. You ever come back here and I will kill you.”
I couldn’t even bring myself to kill spiders, but he didn’t know that.
White teeth flashed in a grin before he dashed off. I wanted to follow him, make sure he left, but I couldn’t move. Hell, I couldn’t hold the mace up anymore. Before it could fall, I shoved it in my pocket, having to try twice. Soft footsteps padded from the direction of the headlights. While my fuzzy mind regretted having pocketed the mace, part of me realized it was probably a concerned neighbor who had heard me yell. But none of my neighbors were as tall and muscular as the man who came running down the alley toward me. I wasn’t sure if it was the headlights, or if he had short golden hair, but one thing I couldn’t miss were his ice-blue eyes. A woman could get caught in eyes like that. The man looked like he’d walked right out of one of the old Norse legends my dad had liked to tell me when I was a kid.
Everything swayed. Or maybe it was me; I couldn’t tell. Strong hands gripped my arms, holding me upright. The skin of his hands tingled against my arms, growing warmer the longer he held on, until it felt like we might melt together into one. Something in my fuzzy brain tried to tell me that wouldn’t be a bad thing, not at all. Those ice-blue eyes snagged my gaze and held on with a vengeance. Heat to rival that of an inferno lay behind those glacial blues and it pulled at me as if it wanted to consume me.
“You should get inside and lock the door behind you. I will go after him,” said a voice with the right timbre to set my nerves vibrating in a very good way.
Survival instincts broke through the haze caused by blood loss. Yeah, that had to be it, the blood loss. I thrust my hand in my pocket and it came back out with my keys. As I turned them in the lock, I forced my weary head up so I could look at the blond man one more time. I wanted to remember his face, and not just because he was the only witness to the assault on me.
“Careful, he’s dangerous,” I warned.
“So am I. Do not worry about me. I will be back to make sure you are all right,” he said.
I turned the knob and nearly fell as the door opened inward. Just before I closed it, I heard the blond man curse in a language I didn’t recognize but that tickled at my memory. Several sets of footsteps pounded on the pavement. I slammed the door shut, threw the deadbolt, and bolted the other two locks for good measure. On weak legs I made my way to the bedroom, using the walls and furniture to keep myself upright. Coagulating blood forced me to peel my hand from my neck so I could use it.
Blood ran in a hot trail from the wound, down my neck and between my breasts. In this light I couldn’t tell by the color alone how bad it was, but the flow was entirely too steady for my comfort. The fact that my heart was working overtime from the stress surely didn’t help. Halfway there, with my stomach threatening to revolt and my vision swimming, I realized I should have grabbed my cell phone off the coffee table. Too late now. Besides, I didn’t want the cops involved. Damn police only made things worse, a lesson I had learned all too well growing up. I’d go back for the phone in a moment and call Nikki from work. She’d take me to the hospital faster than an ambulance could get here. First, I had to stop the bleeding, and I was closer to the bathroom than the living room. Shock would soon slow my heart and with it my blood flow, giving me plenty of time to get to an ER. With six years into my medical degree I could do just as much—or more, in most cases—to stop the bleeding as an EMT anyway.
Hoping I didn’t split my head open on the doorframe, I let go of the wall and took a leap of faith by crossing the open space to the bathroom. My hand left a bloody streak on the door as I stumbled through. The vanity offered me something stable to lean on and was thankfully at the right height so I didn’t have to lift my hand to do so, because at that point, I didn’t think I could.
From within the vanity mirror my ghost stared back at me. Or at least that’s what it looked like. My bronze skin looked sickly pale, a hue I strove hard to avoid with as many hours in the sun as I could manage while working full time at the bar and studying for med school. Blood stained my straight-as-an-arrow black hair, making it cling to my neck and left breast. I didn’t want to peel away the hair, didn’t want to see, but I had to. Swallowing my fear, I pulled my hair away from my neck. The pain caused my vision to go dark, but it came back after a few blinks.
Bright red blood flowed from not one but four sets of holes in my neck, two above and two below my carotid. They weren’t deep enough to show muscle or bone, but the sight of them was enough to make my stomach twist. I definitely should have grabbed my cell phone. I could have at least called one of the waitresses from the bar to come get me. With one hand bracing myself against the sink, I opened the vanity with the other and grabbed the hydrogen peroxide. The way I figured it, a biker guy with a bizarre biting fetish and weird teeth was likely to carry some kind of germs. Even if he didn’t, I wanted to boil the freak’s saliva from my skin and this was the best way I could do it without actually using boiling water.
White-hot agony exploded into my neck as I poured the bottle of peroxide onto the wounds. My vision went black and this time it didn’t clear.