Heart and Soul (17 page)

He swore softly as he cupped her head between his hands, staring down into topaz eyes. Her flesh convulsed around his cock, and he surged against her as he rasped, “Don’t you know? I already do.” He pulled out almost completely and then slammed back into her. “Love
me
.”

Leandra whimpered, her nails biting in his skin. Her neck arched, her lips parted, revealing the elongated curve of fang. She pressed against his chest, her hands insistent, and Mike fell away, swearing viciously as his cock jerked and throbbed demandingly. She rose to her knees and shoved gently at his shoulders, guiding him to his back.

Her braids fell around them as she lowered her head, scraping her fangs delicately down his neck. Straddling him, she used her hand to steady his cock as she took him deep inside. Her back arched, lifting her breasts. Mike reached up, fisting his hands in her braids and dragging her down until he could stare into her eyes.

He wanted something back from her, she knew. But fear kept her silent. Lowering her head, she covered his mouth with hers, pushing her tongue into his mouth.

Disappointment had a bitter taste. Mike swallowed it down, trying to ignore the ache it left in his chest. She’d say it. Sooner or later, she’d tell him.

She cried out his name, and Mike flipped her back onto her back, driving into her with near brutal force. “I love you,” he rasped as he fisted a hand in her hair and brought her mouth to his neck. She struck without saying a word, her fangs piercing his flesh with a hot, sweet pain.

Her bite was near orgasmic on its own, and he fucked her with blind desperation. The burning pleasure from her feeding only added to his need to come, to feel her come around him. Her pussy convulsed, maddening milking sensations that made fire dance along his nerve endings.

Those tiny little caresses were too much—the orgasm ripped through him with an intensity that stole his breath. A strangled moan left him as her mouth fell away from his neck. Shoving up onto his hands, he shuttled his cock in and out with greedy, deep thrusts, hungry for more even as he exploded within the wet, welcoming depths of her sex.

She climaxed around him with a ragged scream, her head falling back, her thighs coming up around his hips, locking him against her. Even before his climax had finished, another slammed into him, and he arched his back, thrusting as deep as he could as his cock jerked and pulsed inside her.

It went on and on until Mike’s vision started to gray. When it finally passed, he collapsed breathless against her, his muscles as limp as putty.

Her arms came up, cuddling his head to her breasts, and Mike told himself that she
did
love him.

Sooner or later, she’d tell him.

Everything would be okay, he told himself as he drifted into sleep. Everything would be just fine.

 

 

BUT MIKE WOKE ALONE.

Leandra wasn’t anywhere in his rooms. And she wasn’t in hers.

A muscle pulsed in his jaw as he tore through the house, searching for her. She had to be here somewhere. The sun was still burning in the sky, and she was damned weak, weak enough that he suspected she wouldn’t rely on magick to protect her from the sun.

But where the hell was she?

CHAPTER SIX

She felt cold.

She’d been fine as she slipped from Mike’s bed and pulled his T-shirt on before padding out of the room, but now she wished she’d dressed completely.

Maybe even pulled on a coat, a scarf, some gloves . . .

Rubbing her icy hands together, Leandra licked her lips and stared at the door in front of her.

Malachi was in there. She could smell him, and the rage she felt coming off of him colored the air.

He wasn’t alone. Leandra could faintly hear the soft, steady breaths of another person. A slow, regular heartbeat. A scent that was disturbingly familiar.

She didn’t want to be here, frozen in front of this door.

But it was like she
had
to go in, like something was compelling her. Even when she tried to walk away, it continued to call to her. It was like a compulsion that had taken control.

Leandra didn’t feel in control as she reached out and closed her hand over the doorknob, turning it slowly. She didn’t feel in control as she stepped inside, and she certainly wasn’t in control as she moved toward the bed and the woman lying in it.

 

 

MALACHI KNEW THERE MAY COME A TIME WHEN HE would regret this.

Shedding the blood of somebody weak and helpless wasn’t something he’d ever found pleasure in. Killing the helpless, or protecting them. That was what separated the Hunters from the ferals. He was about to cross a line, and he knew it.

But he couldn’t let the girl live.

All the good little Hunters were elsewhere. Brianna had taken her normal break, and she wouldn’t be back in here for another fifteen minutes. Malachi only need a few seconds.

The rest of them were busy attending to their normal lives as everybody settled back into some semblance of everyday life. He envied them; they still had some sense of purpose.

Losing Nessa, though, it was like he’d had a blindfold ripped away, and now he saw clearly for the first time in centuries. The ennui he’d been living with was gone, leaving his senses exposed and bare.

He had no purpose. He fought, like they all did, against monsters, but for every single feral creature he killed, ten more rose up. He’d lost too many friends, seen too many innocents die, and he was tired.

Tired of all of it.

Tired, and quite ready to end it.

Leandra would be well; she had finally stopped looking like such a damned shadow and there was a spark of life in her eyes. She’d be well. Mike would see to it. None of the others really needed him. Yes, he was through with it all.

But first—his fangs throbbed as he studied the woman lying still and helpless in the bed. He wouldn’t feed on her, even though he craved the taste of his enemy’s blood. He would simply snap her neck and be done with it.

Some would want answers—he knew he was breaking the law. Council rule decreed that she be aware, awake, able to face her accusers. It wasn’t a defense as the mortal world knew it. But to kill her outside the heat of battle, and before she had been sentenced was a lawbreaker.

They’d want answers.

And he had no intention of offering any explanation. Simply because he wasn’t going to wait around for another sunrise.

Malachi had spent a long time wondering about the best method to end things. Sunlight wouldn’t do it, and he’d be damned if he let one of the sorry ferals end things for him. So he’d have to find a bit more aggressive way to handle things.

Fire was the answer. It would involve a decent amount of pain, but he was no stranger to pain. So long as it ended things; that was all that mattered.

Standing over the bed, Malachi said softly, “If I had known you were going to be this much trouble, I would have ended this myself the night Jonathan brought you here.”

There was no response. She was as still as death, almost as cold. Reaching out, he closed a hand around her neck, and the icy feel of her flesh startled him. Faintly, he could feel the ebb and flow of life under his hand, the faint beat of her pulse, the slow, shallow breaths.

Lifting his other hand, Malachi cupped her chin in his hand. She sighed, the first sound she had made since he had entered the room some hours earlier.

Do it
. Malachi found himself hesitating as he stared into the still, peaceful-looking face.
Do it.

“No!”

Leandra hit him with the force of a tornado, and he caught her wrists in his hands, pinning them behind her back. She didn’t stay subdued any more than a few seconds. Her body flared with heat, the same defensive action she’d used on him just a few weeks ago, fire spilling from her pores to lick at his flesh.

Pure instinct had him leaping back.

“Leave her alone!” Leandra said, her voice hoarse and raspy. Her eyes were wide and unfocused, and she looked like she was going to fall flat on her face. Yet she stood at the side of the bed, protecting that bitch.

“Have you gone mad?” Malachi asked quietly, trying to rein his rage in. “Step aside.”

Leandra shook her head, and when Malachi moved toward her, her eyes widened, and she lifted her hand. Fire flared between them.

“You’ve lost your mind.”

But Leandra didn’t answer him. She sat on the bed, her mocha skin so dark as she cupped Morgan’s face in her hands. “You’re stronger than this . . .”

Peeling his lips back from his teeth, Malachi let his shields drop as he ordered, “Leandra, get away from her.”

Fear had an icy grip around Leandra’s throat.

Her knees shook, and a cold sweat had broken out over her entire body. Only sheer determination kept her there. She shoved to her feet so that she could stand between Malachi and the unconscious woman. “You do not want to kill a helpless woman, Malachi,” she said in a voice that shook. “It is not who you are.”

His eyes glowed, and long ivory fangs pushed down past his upper lip as he snarled, “Do not tell me who I am, Leandra. You seem to have forgotten. Step aside.”

She felt her feet starting to move, and she jerked her eyes away from Mal’s, looking at the center of his chest instead. Her breath wheezed in and out of her lungs as she forced herself to say, “No.”

From the corner of her eye, she could see Morgan’s still body lying in the bed, but it wasn’t truly Morgan she saw. Mal spoke again, but it wasn’t him she heard.

It was the Hunter.

“I am bound to her, for some reason. Completely, totally bound. As long as she lives, I live.”
The Hunter had looked at Leandra with such clear, steady eyes, seemingly unperturbed about being bound to somebody like Morgan.

“Who are you
?” Leandra had asked. Her eyes, they were so familiar.

And then Morgan was there. Laughing. Her eyes so hard and cynical, her soul so full of evil.
“She fears her own weakness. Just like you fear your own strength.”

The Hunter:
“It was boredom. Life has become such a tedious existence.”

Determination gave her strength, and she squared her shoulders, staring at Malachi with a level gaze. “I will not step aside, Malachi. If you wish to deal with her, then you will have to kill me first.”

He wasn’t so far gone that he would kill a fellow Hunter, was he?

Not even a second passed before Leandra was questioning the intelligence of her words. Pain ripped through her head. Distantly, she could hear Malachi comment in a bored tone, “So be it.”

“No!”

Mike tore through the door and launched his body at Malachi. The ancient one turned and struck out, and Mike went flying into the wall. Wood, plaster, and drywall cracked as he hit and fell to the floor in a heap. He didn’t even wait for his head to clear as he rolled to his feet.

The Change ripped through him with painful intensity; one second he was in human form, and then the wolf’s form took over, tearing from his body. But as he crouched down and prepared to leap for Malachi, Sarel and Lori appeared in front of him. “No, Mike,” Lori whispered, shaking her head.

He was frozen in place, unable to move, trapped there, watching as his mate lie on the ground, her hands clutching her head, blood trickling from her mouth.

Kelsey pushed in between Leandra and Malachi. “Stop it, Mal.”

“Get out of my way, Kelsey.”

“And if I don’t, what will you do? I’m no vampire—I’m not a creature you sired—I am just a woman who had placed her faith in you. You have no power over me.”

A long, pale arm moved as Malachi reached for Kelsey, but when he touched her, flame erupted. He ignored it, closing his hand around the front of her shirt, jerking her toward him. “You go too far,” he growled.

“And you have forgotten who you are,” Kelsey said quietly. A smile curved her lips, sad and bittersweet. “Is this how you want to be remembered? The great Malachi, Hunted down by his own for killing fellow Hunters?”

“There is not one among them that can face me,” Malachi purred. He ignored the flame licking at his arm as he lowered his head and whispered into her ear, “None who can stop me. Look around you. Do you see someone who can even hope to stop me?”

“I have more than hope,” Kelsey murmured. Her voice was thick with tears, and the sigh that shuddered out of her sounded more like a sob. “I’d hoped it wouldn’t ever come down to this.”

Her hands came up, cupping his face, and fire exploded, wrapping around them in a tight embrace.

It wasn’t the pain of the fire licking at his flesh that brought him out of his rage. It was the soft, agonized gasp that escaped Kelsey as the fire burned her as well. Like a bucket of icy water thrown on him, his head cleared, and he shoved himself away from Kelsey with a roar.