Hearts Aflame Collection: 4-Book Bundle (2 page)

She jumped fully her feet, sped toward him.
But he jumped back, moving at more than human speed the same moment
he felt the presence of others in the small clearing. Other
non-humans. But even more, what grabbed his attention was the fact
of her eyes on him, watching. The hatred and fear of him along with
another emotion poured from her like poisoned water.

Garrett knew he should leave her. Obviously,
she had trapped him here for a reason. The others like her were
coming, but he couldn’t stop staring at her soft mouth, at the way
she moved as if flowing across the earth like a piece of silk on a
breeze. Her eyes were black and vicious as they stared at him, into
him.

“Outsider!” She snarled.

The female leapt at him, her hand lashing
out. Pain ripped into Garrett’s chest. Lashing into him until he
clenched his teeth, biting back a howl of agony. Okay, now she was
playing serious games. He bared his teeth, fingers curled. She
dared to hurt him when all he had wanted to do was save her? Her
eyes glittered in triumph as he moved closer. But then the smell of
the others rose up even more around him. At least six others.
Carrying guns. He bared his teeth at the woman, growling. Then he
leapt over her head away from the smell of the other vampires,
tearing into the bushes and toward safety.

Chapter Two

Garrett ran. Tearing through the bushes that
tore at him in return; slashing at his clothes, at his face. As the
sticks and twigs scratched him, ripping open his skin, he felt
blood well up, the sting of each wound opening, then felt them
begin closing even as he sprinted through the darkness, avoiding
the lights and the humans on a path he’d taken a thousand times
before.

His chest burned from where she had struck
him. She had sunk a piece of metal into his skin. His flesh had
already begun to heal around it. The burn of it in his skin was
agony. As if she had poisoned him. He ran past an abandoned store
window. The reflective glass briefly showed him. Dark and
desperate, racing, his leather jacket flapping behind him. His feet
barely touched the ground.

That woman! Another vampire. Gloriously
provocative. And she had harmed him.

They were coming after him, he felt it. He
felt them close. Relentlessly pursuing just as his sire had said
they would all those years ago. But after almost ninety years with
no sign of other vampires coming to take his freedom or his life,
Garrett had grown complacent living in Atlanta. And they’d almost
taken him. Never again. But he couldn’t get the face of that woman
from his mind. Blazing eyes. A body fit for loving. Even now, he
felt himself stir at the remembered look of her.

He was close to his sanctuary now. Garrett
slowed. He was in the woods. His cabin was only a few hundred feet
away, across the creek and through the trees. He leapt through the
fallen leaves, careful to leave no trace. At the cabin door, he
typed in the code for the electronic lock, and closed himself
inside.

His heart pounded in his chest, blood roaring
through his body. It was a good thing he had fed earlier that day,
glutted himself on a deer he’d found roaming through Candler Park.
It wasn’t the kind he’d preferred. But it was hot and fresh from
the source. Choosing not to kill humans and to use only sip from a
select few of the whores and runaways he’d encountered on Ponce de
Leon Avenue often left him unable to be choosy about where his next
blood meal was coming from.

He slammed the cabin door, walking quickly
into the belly of his refuge, not his true home, but the place his
sire had urged him to cultivate in case he ever came under the
watch of clan vampires. It was a sparse place. A small place. A log
cabin, mostly hidden by the trees. Inside, it had nothing but a
bed, weapons, first aid supplies, a cache of blood in the fridge.
If they had been able to find Garrett at that diner, then they
probably already knew where he lived. Perhaps even waited there for
him now.

He ripped off his shirt, strode into the
bathroom, growling in annoyance at himself. He should have been
more careful. He should have moved on like his sire had advised him
to do. But he enjoyed being in Atlanta. The sights and sounds of
the city that reminded him so much of Chicago; the place where he
was born and had been stolen by his sire.

The mirror reflected back Garrett’s
blood-streaked face. Healed. Grimacing. The thick black curls
spilling untidily around his face. Golden eyes glittering in fury
and pain. That woman! Growling, he shoved her from his mind.
Another time.

He grabbed the first aid kit, kicked the door
shut to have access to the full-length mirror behind it, and sank
to the floor. His flesh throbbed over the metal stuck under the
healed skin. He had to get it out. Although metal healed into his
vampire skin wouldn’t kill him, it was painful as hell and made any
injury he’d suffered as a human pale by comparison. He’d learned
that lesson well enough when his sire had broken off a sword
between his ribs and left him to putrefaction in agony for days.
That had been a lesson in how the clan vampires would treat him if
they found him; one of the ways they would try to convert him join
their clans. Pain. Denial. Starvation. Temptation.

Garrett grabbed a scalpel from the first aid
kit and sliced into his own skin. His jaw clenched in agony as he
pried the small square from the flesh that had grown around it.
Into it. As he ripped out the metal, blood welled up, spilled down
his chest to his belly. His eyes narrowed. A faint trace of energy,
something digital hummed from the flat black square. A tracking
device. Fuck!

He jumped up, crushed the thing under his
boot. He grabbed his shirt, pulling it on as he ran from the
bathroom and to the hidden panel behind the flat-screen TV that
kept his weapons. The front door crashed open, splinters flying. He
grabbed an assault rifle, whirling to face the intruders.

“Drop it!”

The vampire woman stood in his doorway. She
pointed some sort of gun at him. At least he assumed it was a gun.
It was long and reflective, its two barrels leveled at him with
deadly intent.

“I said, drop the fucking gun.”

Garrett’s hand tightened around the assault
rifle loaded with hollow points. It would not kill a vampire, but
it would slow them down until he swooped in to take their head.
Once the head was gone, the existence was gone. But he didn’t want
to take this woman’s head. Something about her - perhaps simply her
very femaleness - called out to him. Made him want to take her into
his arms and—

Her finger tightened on the trigger. Garrett
leapt wide and to her left just as the gun roared. The wall behind
where he had been standing was covered in a glittering web, some
sort of electronic net. Capture him. She wanted to capture him! He
leapt, running up the side of the wall to the ceiling.

The gun exploded again as she growled at him
in a language he didn’t understand. A net shot from the gun and
pinned the ceiling above her head. But he was already dropping down
on top of her, wrestling the gun from her hand. He grabbed her
wrists to take the gun from her hand, twisting them until the bones
snapped. She screamed, more in anger than agony, as the gun
clattered to the floor. Garrett grabbed the vampire woman, slammed
her into the wall, grabbed her arms, and pinned them behind her
back.

She screamed. “Let me go, you piece of
filth!”

Garrett ground the broken bones of her wrist
together. Already, they were healing. He knew she was in pain. He’d
felt it in himself from the many times his much stronger sire had
trained him, slamming pain into him to make him stronger. He tried
to be gentler with her, but the vampire woman only screamed
obscenities at him for his efforts, tried to head butt him. He
grabbed a poker from the fireplace and bent it tightly around her
wrists. He slammed her to the floor and rolled her onto her
stomach, then did the same to her ankles. All the while, she bucked
wildly, shrieking the things she would do to him once she got free,
how she would make him scream for his mother and beg for this
second life of his to end.

All the while she yelled and called him the
filthiest names imaginable, he expected footsteps. Expected the
smell of other vampires to roll through the air, befouling his
retreat. But it was just her. No one else. He sat on the vampire
woman’s back, breathing heavily.

She bucked under him like a wild thing, but
he simply kept her down with his full weight, waiting for her to
wear herself out. It took a long time.

“Let me up, loner,” she growled. “Do it now
and I won’t make it so painful for you when I kill you. When the
others come, I’ll tell them to be gentle with you. They will only
snap your neck instead of torturing you for daring to touch
me.”

“I doubt your friends are coming,” Garrett
said, the certainty of that growing the more he looked down at the
woman.

She had rushed out to hunt him herself. The
tracking device sunk into his body had been hers and hers alone. No
one else followed its electronic signal. Garrett watched her with
narrowed eyes.

Under him, she was as lushly curved as he
remembered from the clearing. Her body encased in close-fitting
jeans, a t-shirt and a leather jacket and stretched across her
back. Even now, with her depleted energy, she still squirmed
underneath him, her luscious bottom moving in a way that excited
him. He could feel himself hardening; the blood pumping harder
through his veins.

Shit! Why hadn’t he taken a human woman
regularly as his sire had advised? There were so many things now
that he wished he had done. With the first vampire woman he had
been close to in over fifty years writhing under him, grunting and
threatening to gut him with her bare hands, he was as hard as a
pike.

“Be still!” he growled.

“Or what, Outsider?”

She bucked even more. He abruptly stood up,
lifted her in one hand, scooped up the gun in the other. He dropped
her on the couch, grabbed the gun to shoot her. The woman growled
just as the gun barked, an electronic net pinned her down, sparking
webs of blue electricity, completely encasing her, anchored to the
floor on one side, the couch on the other. Now, she was his
prisoner.

Garrett took the moment to stare down at the
female vampire at his leisure. But even as he enjoyed the sight of
her staining against the bright blue webbing, her breasts straining
against the white t-shirt and leather jacket, part of him was
screaming for him to “run, Run, RUN!” and grab his things: the
guns, money, passport, the new truck, and leave her there on the
floor for her comrades to find.

But even as the warning burst through him, he
was already ignoring it. Yes, he grabbed his bag filled with a few
clothes, the guns packed with hollow points, the cash, his blood
rations. But with his chest heaving from the exertion of fighting
with her, he grabbed a tranquilizer from his first aid kit and
crept up to her.

“Leave me be, worm!” The vampire woman was
the fiercest creature he’d ever encountered.

She twisted in the same bonds she would have
used to subdue him; the electrified webbing was trapping her to the
floor while seeming to also sap her tremendous strength. Garrett
knelt at her side. “I’ll leave you the same way you left me,
woman.” He slid the needle in her neck. Moments later, she sagged
and went completely still. He waited another few minutes to make
sure she wasn’t faking it before putting his hastily patched
together plan into action.

Chapter Three

The road flew past under the truck’s tires.
Garrett rested his hands easily on the wheel, though he kept
checking his mirrors and his preternatural senses to see if anyone
followed them, if any of his enemies were near. On the seat beside
him, the vampire woman lay still knocked out, belted in, naked
except for his shirt, her head lolling against the window. He’d
wanted to leave her behind. It had even seemed like the best course
of action to make sure he got out of this confrontation with his
freedom and his undead life.

But something had drawn him to the woman like
steel to a magnet. And it wasn’t simply her incredible beauty. He
had seen more beautiful women before. Human women, of course, since
he had never before been so close to an undead female. But the
smell of her was like a drug. Her blood that had spilled when they
fought. The cool touch of her skin against his. Her body that
seemed to have risen from one of his wet dreams. It didn’t matter
that she was trying to kill him. He had to find out more about
her.

So he had stripped her of all her clothing,
in case she had more tracking devices hidden, buttoned one of his
shirts on her unresisting body, and took her with him. The human
being that still remained inside him was appalled at what he was
doing. He was imprisoning a woman and taking her somewhere that
even he knew nothing about: the town of Savannah where his sire had
eventually found and kept a house.

Garrett sailed down the highway in the old
truck. It was one he’d always kept on the property and in working
order, tags up to date in the name of a long-dead human. In his
daily existence, he was never one for cars; he walked swiftly
enough to cover enough miles that he needed. But in running from
vampires intent on his capture or true death, having a vehicle
handing seemed like a practical thing.

The engine was newer than the body of the
truck, a 500 horsepower block taken from an American muscle car.
The truck growled as it barreled down the highway, the warm night
air pouring into the windows to wash over Garrett’s face. He was on
the run for the first time in his life. His eyes dipped to the
drugged woman in the car beside him. But also, for the first time
in his life, it felt good to him not to be alone.