From the Shadows (A Shadow Chronicles Novel) (7 page)

I sighed. “When Mark and Saphrona met. See, the blood of an immortal human is a really powerful narcotic to vampires. Obviously my mother is not Mark’s birth mother—her name was Patricia, and she was attacked by a rogue vampire when she was about eight months pregnant. Patricia didn’t survive the attack but Mark did, because the vamp’s draculin had already begun to change him. My mother—do you remember she’s a nurse? Well, she was working in the ER the night Patricia was brought in after my dad found her in their house. She knew right away that it had been a vampire attack, and that Mark was becoming a
dhunphyr
, because she’s a weredog too. I inherited it from her.

“Mom reported the attack and Mark’s condition to her
Packmaster, and he arranged for the rogue to be hunted down and killed so he couldn’t let slip the possibility that an immortal human had been created. She knew Mark would need protection, so she offered to help my dad take care of him. He was so devastated by his first wife’s death that he hired her as a full-time caretaker. Eventually he recovered enough to fall in love with my mom, and three years after they got married I came along.”

I took a deep breath and plunged ahead. “The dogs we had were members of my pack
—one of my aunts and one of my uncles, in fact. They gave up a great deal of their lives to be Mark’s guardian, at least until they imprinted. And then he joined the Marines after high school, so we were less concerned with his needing a bodyguard.”

“Mark actually became a leatherneck? Are you serious?” Race asked with a raised eyebrow.

His surprise at this news made me smile. “Yeah, he really did. He was actually one of their best snipers. But a year ago he was injured by an IED, and he swears that he should have died…but he didn’t, because of the healing factor. He calls it Wolverine Syndrome. So he opted out and took a year off to clear his head and figure out what the hell was going on with himself. Just about a month ago, he applied to work on Saphrona’s farm.”

“Didn’t you say she’s part vampire
?” Race queried, and I nodded. “What kind of vampire lives on a damn farm?”

“The kind that gave up human blood when she found out her father left her mother to die without a second thought,” I replied. “She set up the farm back in the 1800s and got herself a veterinary degree so she could draw blood from the cows and pigs she breeds. She lives there for a few years, maybe a decade or so, then moves before people can start asking questions about her lack of aging. After a while
she moves back again.”

“So Mark applied for a job on her farm, and then what?”

“Well, vampires apparently bond in a similar manner to our imprinting—they actually have soulmates too. Mark happens to be Saphrona’s.”

I felt my chest begin to tighten again as I once again remembered what had come after Mark and Saphrona’s bonding. Race noticed and he finally came back to sit on the edge of the coffee table, once again taking my hands in his.

“And what happened after that, Juliette?” he asked me softly. “Is that when them fucking leeches attacked you?”

I nodded. “Saphrona also had a sister, a she-vamp her father had turned after she disowned him. Evangeline was a raving lunatic who was jealous of Saphrona because
Diarmid and Lochlan loved her so much, even though she’d pretty much walked away from the vampire life. She had these two males named Martin and Peter who were basically her puppets. I’d moved to the farm, too, after Mark and Saphrona bonded and he found out about me, about werekind and vampires. The three of us and Lochlan went to see a movie a couple days after they met and Martin had followed us, on Evangeline’s orders. He attacked Mark in the bathroom but since Lochlan was in there too, they managed to fight him off. Loch broke his neck and they stuffed him in a stall, and then we left.

“The next day we all flew to Ireland to see this psychic
—who said she was a freakin’ weredragon, I kid you not—so that she could confirm whether or not Mark was really immortal. Saphrona needed the reassurance because she actually hadn’t known that a
dhunphyr
’s blood was a narcotic to her father’s people, especially after I told her about how Mark became one. Werekind history says that most of the
dhunphyr
created in the past were killed soon after birth because of the addictive properties of their blood, and Lochlan confirmed it. The psychic assured us he is, in fact, immortal. So he’s going to live as long as Saphrona does.”

Race raised his eyebrow again. “Wait, you just said he was immortal
—like a vampire, except he doesn’t have to drink blood and can walk around during the day like a normal person, right?”

I nodded. “As I said before, vampire pair-bonding is actually a lot like our imprinting. Once the bond is completed, the life forces of a couple basically merge. If one dies, the other dies too. So if Mark is ever beheaded or his heart is destroyed, Saphrona will die. Same goes for him if either ever happens to her.”

Suddenly feeling restless, as the part where I’d been kidnapped was soon to come up in my story, I stood and walked to the window, staring out at the half-filled parking lot below.

“On our way home that night,” I continued, “after we were back on American soil and on the way back to the farm, Saphrona’s neighbor called
her cell. Someone had set her barn on fire—we later found out it was Martin, who had survived the fight at the movie theater because he hadn’t lost his head or his heart. All her animals except for her bull and four horses, and her two dogs that were in the house, were killed. I’d moved into the apartment over the barn so I could remain near Mark, because I’d been his guardian ever since he came home from Afghanistan, and I’d lost a lot of my clothes when the barn burned. I took Mark’s truck to go shopping as I hadn’t brought my own car over yet, and I actually made it to the mall at Easton before…”

I began to shake as the memories flo
oded my mind once more. I was really going to do this, to tell someone everything I had endured. It was killing me relive the terror but I forced myself to continue. I started to cry again and this time I didn’t bother trying to stop the tears from falling. “Martin and Peter, Evangeline’s minions, they jumped me in the parking garage. Knocked me out and drugged me and drove me back to town, where they chained me up on a wall in this secret room Evangeline had in the basement of Diarmid’s mansion. They stripped my clothes off. They…they used me for a punching bag and an ash tray.”

“Oh Christ,” Race swore, coming up behind me and wrapping his arms around me for a second time. I stiffened in his arms even as our bond reassured me that he would never hurt me.
It didn’t matter—I felt trapped as I had that night and I wanted nothing more than to get away. As if he sensed my desire to pull away, Race tightened his hold ever so slightly.

“I’m not letting go this time,” he whispered in my ear. “You have nothing to fear from me.”

He then kissed my temple before lightly laying his head against mine. “Tell me the rest, baby. Let it all out.”

Fighting the urge to flee
, I choked on a sob and raised my hands to clasp his arms in a death grip. “After they’d had their fun, they drove me over to Saphrona’s house and threw me out of the car at the end of her driveway. By that time she and Mark had left to go looking for me, because Mom had called to tell them she couldn’t get a hold of me. Diarmid had brought Evangeline over earlier that night to meet Mark so she’d get used to his scent and not be inclined to attack him if they met in public, so Lochlan had decided to drop by and see how the meeting turned out. He’s the one who found me. He took me into the house and started to treat me—he’s a doctor—and he called Saphrona to tell her. She called my mom.”

Th
rough the emotional turmoil, I began to feel the power of the bond between Race and me, and it helped me relax enough to lean back into him. I took a shuddering breath, then forged ahead. “The drug Peter and Martin gave me is one that slows a shifter’s healing and even inhibits their ability to phase. Lochlan determined that in order to help me heal faster, he or Saphrona would have to feed on me long enough to draw it out. Because hybrids don’t produce draculin, it was decided the safest person to do it was Saphrona. And it worked. By the next morning I was practically fully recovered.

“But by the time Saphrona and I
got up, Mark had received a text message from my cell phone, which had been stolen by Peter and Martin. They led him into a trap, because Evangeline really wanted Saphrona. And we all walked right into it—Saphrona, Lochan, and I had gone in search of Mark, and we were ambushed. Like I said, Evangeline hated Saphrona. She wanted her dead. She wanted it so bad that she was willing to give up having an immortal human to feed on, because she stabbed Mark in the heart right in front of Saphrona and Lochlan. He died, but he recovered in three days’ time because his heart hadn’t been destroyed. Saphrona fought with Evangeline and killed her, even cut her head off with the same knife she’d stabbed Mark with.”

I turned around in Race’s arms then and curled myself against his chest, closing my eyes as tight as I could against the horror of what I had to say next. Race held me by the shoulders with one arm while his other hand began to slowly stroke my back.

“While all that was going on, Peter had tied me to a bed—I’d gotten a broken arm in the initial fight and was too weak to fight him off, to stop him. I didn’t have any clothes on either, because I’d lost them when I phased. Just fucking made it easier for him to rape me like he’d wanted to the night before, when Martin wouldn’t let him because Evangeline had told them just to beat the crap out of me. After a while Martin came into the room and took his turn.”

Sniffling again, I finished the story of my Day of Hell, describing how Lochlan and Saphrona had burst into the room, how they’d fought Peter and Martin and Lochlan had torn both their heads off. I told him how I’d wished I had been able to kill them myself, and how I prayed they were both burning in hell right alongside Saphrona’s psychotic sister.

“Oh, my sweet Juliette,” Race breathed, holding me tighter. “I am so, so sorry. I know it doesn’t help you now, but I am so very sorry you had to go through that. I wish I could have been there to save you.”

I began to cry harder, wishing he had been there too. I had no doubt that had my
mate been with us that day, neither Peter nor Martin would have had the chance to lay one finger on me. Race held me close as I sobbed, crying out all the pain and misery I’d held inside for the last three weeks. When my shaking finally subsided and my wailing had reduced to soft whimpers, he reached down and slid one arm across the back of my knees, lifting me and cradling me against his chest. I buried my face in his shoulder as he turned and carried me into his bedroom, laying me down on the bed gently and then climbing in next to me.

Race lifted my head long enough to slip an arm beneath it, which he wrapped around my shoulders ag
ain as he tucked my head under his chin with his other hand. I curled into him, sniffling, as he kissed the top of my head.

“Sleep now, sweetheart,” he whispered. “I’ve got you.”

Taking a deep, shuddering breath, I did as I was told.

***

Later that morning, I awoke facing the window. Sunlight was streaming between the blinds and warming my face. For a split second I was disoriented as to where I was, but the feel of Race’s arms around me, his leg thrown over mine and my back up against his chest quickly brought it all back. I had imprinted the night before on someone I hadn’t seen in nearly two decades. He turned out to be a chimaera and had also imprinted on me. I’d told him about the technical differences between werekind and shapeshifters. I’d told him about Mark and Saphrona…

…and about the Day of Hell.

And I realized then that for the first time in three weeks, I had not dreamed about it. If I had dreamed anything at all I could not remember—I only knew that I’d not had my sleep disturbed by having to relive the nightmare of my ordeal while I was unconscious. I then figured it was because I’d already done so that night by telling the story to Race. And maybe because he had held me through the night, and I had felt safe and secure in his arms. That last thought made me smile.

Slowly I turned myself over to look at him. When we were face-to-face he opened his eyes, looking at me as if thankful that my being there wasn’t a dream.

“Good morning,” he said softly. “How are you feeling?”

I thought about that a moment. “Drained,” I said, “but in a good way. You actually did help me last night, Race. Meeting you again and initiating the bond compelled me to talk about what happened, something I’ve been refusing to do because it hurt too much to
even think about it—I have never been so frightened in all my life as I was that day. I have no illusions that one conversation has healed me, but it’s a start. I have you to thank for that.”

Race’s mouth turned up at the corners. “Then I am glad to have been of service.”

I looked into his steady gaze, studied his smile. My eyes traced the edge of his strong jaw and the short growth of beard, before drifting once more to his mouth. His lips were a bit plump for a guy—pillowy, I’d thought last night—but not too big. I thought they were perfect, that he had the most incredible mouth I’d ever seen on a man.

And I felt the stronge
st urge right then to have a taste of it.