“She’ll be fine,” John drawled, his twang betraying his Texas roots. “This ain’t her first rodeo.”
True enough. The woman, whose name Nate thought was Allison, lay motionless and pale on the table, her silver tube top barely covering breasts made too big by a surgeon’s scalpel, and her black micro-mini skirt definitely not covering what it needed to. She was a regular here, a swan who gave herself to vampires for blood, sex, or both.
John carefully applied a bandage over the punctures on her neck . . . a neck that was scarred from hundreds of feedings.
The scent of blood teased Nate’s nostrils, drawing his gaze to a crimson trail on the inside of the girl’s thigh and reminding him that he hadn’t fed recently.
“There were two feeding on her,” he said, gesturing to the seeping punctures in her femoral artery. Some vampire had done a piss-poor job of sealing the wound.
John leaned in to examine the second bite. “Could have been just the one, tapping two places.”
“Different size fangs. The one at her throat was female.” Which, dammit, meant Marsden had another vamp to punish. “Alert me when you release the human.”
Nate didn’t wait for a response. He went straight to the bar, poured a double shot of O-neg, and took the edge off his hunger. His blood hunger, anyway. As he watched the grind of bodies on the floor, another need rose in him, one he hadn’t sated in far too long.
Marsden came up behind him and clapped him on the shoulder. “That hot little piece of human ass at the end of the bar has been eyeing you.”
Yeah, he’d already felt her lusty gaze on him. “I don’t need your matchmaking skills.”
“You need something. You’re wound around the axel, man. Want me to send her to your office?”
The human woman tilted her head to expose her slim throat as she ran black-lacquered fingernails along her cleavage in blatant invitation. He wondered if she was a star-fucker who knew who he was, a legend in the blood arena, or if she was a run-of-the-mill vampire chaser eager for any set of fangs to penetrate her. Either way, Nate wasn’t game no matter how strung out he was. He’d always preferred to get his blood and sex from females he hadn’t seen screwing other males that night.
“No.” He started to walk away, but Marsden’s hand on his arm stopped him.
“Trust me on this. You need to work off some juice.”
A chill shot up Nate’s spine, and his jaw clenched so hard he could barely ask the question he already knew the answer to. “Why?”
Marsden’s nostrils flared, the diamond nose stud glinting in the smoky light. “He’s coming.”
The demon who owned both Thirst and Gladius was coming for a visit. Nate waited for the hatred to sear him from the inside, but instead, his chest cavity filled with ice, and his entire body went so cold he shivered. Fade was the reason Nate had infiltrated the club’s organization in the first place. He’d waited for decades to destroy the bastard, had gained his trust while growing stronger and amassing a fortune at the demon’s expense.
Nate’s hatred had eaten him alive for decades, but now it seemed that the hatred had been replaced by apathy. Once upon a time, Fade had killed the love of Nate’s life, and it was now becoming obvious that the demon had also killed Nate. He searched deep inside himself in an attempt to find a flicker of life, but there wasn’t even a spark.
He. Was. Dead.
Chapter 2
Incoming emergencies got Vladlena Paskelkov’s adrenaline surging and brought her to life like nothing else. As a nurse at the only hospital that catered to vampires, demons, and other various underworld creatures, she got to see things she’d never encounter at a human facility and, as with most medical people, the more bizarre or horrific the injury, the more excited she got.
It wasn’t as if she liked seeing anyone hurt, especially not the young of any species. But she’d inherited the medical gene from her father, who had been a surgeon at this very hospital.
Until he was tortured and killed by The Aegis, a society of human demon slayers who called themselves Guardians and made it their mission to rid the planet of evil.
Lena had been bitter, but not for long. Her father, though he’d been good to her, had walked a sinister path, and she was surprised the slayers hadn’t killed him sooner. She’d also learned to like a few Guardians, including one who used to work at Underworld General but now ran The Aegis, and one who was mated to the hospital’s chief of staff.
And speak of the incubus, Eidolon, a dark-haired, impossibly hot Seminus demon, jogged into the bustling emergency department and snagged a pair of surgical gloves from the supply stand.
“What have we got?”
Lena gloved up as she spoke. “Male shifter, unknown breed. Found like the others, with multiple wounds, no vitals when the paramedics found him, but Shade got him jump-started.”
Eidolon smirked. “What were Shade’s exact words?”
Shade, Eidolon’s brother in charge of the hospital’s paramedics, rarely minced words. Yes, he’d given her all the technical jargon, but only after his more personal observations.
“Hell’s fucking rings,” she said, doing her best Shade imitation. “Dude looks like he went through a wood chipper.”
One dark eyebrow arched. “That’s more like it.” The red rotating light at the ambulance bay doors lit up, signaling the ambulance’s arrival in the underground lot. Before the doors opened, Eidolon turned to her, lowering his voice. “Did the serum work?”
All the adrenaline that had been surging through her veins turned to sludge, and she absently rubbed the spot on the back of her hand where she’d given herself the injection.
“No.” She cleared her voice to rid it of the sudden hoarseness. “I didn’t shift.”
Pity dulled Eidolon’s espresso eyes. “I’m sorry, Lena. I’ll keep working on it.”
He didn’t say anything more. What was there to say? Sorry you’re a freak who can’t shift into your animal form, even with a drug that works on everyone else? Sorry you’re going to go insane and die?
Over the years, she’d been through therapy and lessons, desperate to shift into her furry form before she turned twenty-four, when the inability to shift would kill her. Yesterday, on her twenty-fourth birthday, she’d injected a drug Eidolon had developed as a catalyst for those who couldn’t shift any other way. It hadn’t worked. She was a failure among failures, and it was probably a good thing her father wasn’t alive to see how, very soon, she’d lose her grip on reality and grow violent before finally dying in agony. Shifters with her problem rarely survived more than six weeks after turning twenty-four, and she’d already started marking off days on the calendar. So much time wasted. So much more she’d wanted to do.
This really sucked.
The ER doors whooshed open, and Shade and his partner, a werewolf named Luc, wheeled in a bloody male on a stretcher. As they hurried the patient to a room, Shade rattled off vitals, the dismal numbers putting an immediate damper on hope. Lena had only been out of nursing school for a couple of years, but she knew a goner when she saw one.
The acrid stench of death clung to this male like a dire leech, and . . . she gasped, grinding to a halt as Shade and Luc lifted the patient onto a table.
“Vladlena?” Eidolon’s right arm, which was encased in glyphs that ran from his fingertips to his shoulder, lit up as the healing ability inherent to his species channeled into the male. “You know this patient?”
“Vaughn.” She stumbled to the side of the bed, her legs threatening to give out on her. “He’s my brother.”