Bloodlands (17 page)

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Authors: Christine Cody

BOOK: Bloodlands
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Trying to keep my hands busy, I steeped the hot water with a loto cactus–filled wire mesh strainer. I hoped Gabriel didn’t see how my hands shook.
When I was ready, I brought the steaming mugs out, handing one to Gabriel, then taking my own toward the study, where I thought it might be a good idea to hole up for a while.
But halfway there, something on the visz stopped me.
Sammy Ramos and the old man had taken up space in the common area, yet they weren’t sitting round lazily gabbing with each other. They were in front of the lens, where the old man was waving his arms, as if to get attention.
Gabriel and Chaplin were drawn to the visz, too. Our guest even turned up the volume.
The oldster yelled, “Mariah!”
From the way he was shouting it, he sounded more worried than ecstatic. I froze in my very steps.
Sammy chimed in. “If you didn’t hear us before, another of Stamp’s men was found dead. Gutted. Half-buried in the dirt with that whale-hide hat of his sticking out. Come over here if you hear us!”
“We’re gonna keep repeating ourselves, Mariah, because we can’t get through the inner locks barring your doors!”
My hand darted toward the monitor to shut it off, blanking the screen.
Blanking everything. And, for a blessed second, the darkened visz truly made me feel as if nothing were there.
If it wasn’t there, it couldn’t affect me.
But Chaplin was whimpering, and I couldn’t shut
that
out because it sounded like puncturing yells. And when Gabriel reached out to turn the visz back on, one look at his face told me that the hiding was over.
Thanks to another dead body, Stamp was going to be coming for us.
12
 
Gabriel
 
B
eyond Mariah shutting off the visz screen, it was obvious to Gabriel that she didn’t want to hear anything else from Sammy and the old man. Her rejection of their news was in the remoteness of her expression, the drag of her heartbeat.
And, just as if she felt Gabriel’s gaze all over her, probing, wondering, she stepped over to a second monitor—one whose lens was trained on the wide, desert-empty view outside. She adjusted the definition of the picture, her pulse taking up its normal time again, then speeding up with every passing moment.
“Why’d you ff the common-area visz?” he asked. “The news doesn’t concern you?”
Her throat worked around a swallow, and Chaplin sat on his haunches, resting his paw against her leg while sending a troubled gaze up at her. Otherwise, the dog had shut his mind.
Gabriel heard Mariah’s pulse stretching, a weak vibrato in its tremble, and the sight and sound of it moving in her neck vein dug into him.
“Mariah,” he added, “maybe we should be planning to batten down the hatches.”
She backed away from the monitors, as if this were the only way she could escape any trouble. Then she went to the weapons wall, running her hands over the deadly choices as she faced away from him. “Stamp didn’t listen,” she said unevenly. “And they’re paying the price. But he’ll be putting the cost on someone else.”
He could understand her anger. It was delivered out of fear, and the two often went hand in hand. Miles yonder, where Stamp lived, he would also be angry—enough to retaliate against those he blamed—and it would’ve come out of his own fear for his men.
A vicious circle, Gabriel thought, just like a formation of carrion feeders in the sky.
“Tell me, Mariah, just how
would
Sammy and the oldster know about this new death? How can they be sure it’s even a reality with the way everyone keeps to the sanctuary?”
Her shoulders were slumped, like she was trying to clamp down on a burgeoning pain inside her. “Unlike some of us, Sammy puts on a heat suit and ventures a decent distance away from here before most dusks hit. He hunts for meat out there, brings it back for trade, and that’s how he discovered the . . . first body.” She seemed to fold into herself even more. “Then a second one tonight.”
Gabriel’s eyes rested on the outside visz screen, which showed the moon, the grasping shadow of the nearby loto cactus under which he’d buried his blood flask.
“Stamp’s gonna be back,” he said. “He told us he would be if this happened again.”
Now she was breathing faster, approaching panic.
Where had the woman who’d initially confronted him with that crossbow gone? Was he so much less scary than Stamp that she’d been able to stand up to
him
but couldn’t bring herself to do the same with the kid?
Ironic, Gabriel thought. He, a vampire, seemed less intimidating to her than a regular bad guy, and he had to wonder why that was. Letting him into her home might’ve been the worst decision she’d ever made; it was even possible that
he’d
been the one who’d brought Stamp’s ire upon them. Gabriel only wished he knew what had happened during every one of his blackouts, wished he knew who or what his meals had been consisting of lately.
Instinctively, as if to compensate, he moved toward Mariah, lifting his hand. What if he could manage to soothe her with just a touch?
For some reason, Chaplin growled at Gabriel.
Back off.
He let his hand fall to his side, seeing the dog’s glare.
It wasn’t okay to be a vampire with Mariah, Gabriel thought to himself. That was what he believed Chaplin was getting at, anyway.
And the dog was right. It wasn’t fine to act that way. He didn’t even
want
to. Besides, either she would be wise to what he was doing or she would shirkff altogether. Also, last night, all he’d had to do was take a gander at her undressing, and it’d sent him off the deep end.
Gabriel shouldn’t be getting near her.
After a conflicted glance at Gabriel—a look that made him back off even more—Chaplin went to the trapdoor, making agitated woofing sounds. Mariah angled her face toward him.
“No,” she said, her voice lower and far more jagged than he’d ever heard it. “I don’t want you out there.”
The dog opened his mind so Gabriel could understand the discussion.
No worry. I can scent Stamp’s men far off if they’re coming. I go out, I come back in. Give me fifteen minutes.
The dog shot a glance at Gabriel.
Meanwhile, you stay away from her.
Gabriel didn’t argue—not about staying away and not about the prospect of Chaplin going outside. The canine’s abilities weren’t anything to scoff at. Back in the day, Intel Dogs could fight almost as well as any monster, and that was why the government hadn’t wanted them around. They’d started to rebel in some circles, and the bigwigs had feared the dogs would turn on them one day.
Addressing Mariah, Gabriel pretended that he didn’t understand what Chaplin was saying. “Is he asking to go outside?”
“He’s asking,” Mariah whispered, “but he’s not getting.”
“Then I’ll go.”
Chaplin jumped in with a direct mind-link to his temporary master as Mariah emphatically shook her head.
Don’t, Gabriel,
the dog thought.
My nose is better than yours. I can see if Stamp is on his way and how many he might be bringing with him. I won’t take long at all.
His last words were more warning to keep a distance from Mariah than Gabriel had ever heard from the dog, and without waiting for a response, Chaplin hit the trapdoor release, scrambling up some ledges that circled the wall while sand poured down. The dog jumped through the rain of it, disappearing outside, the door automatically shutting behind him.
Chaplin!” Mariah started over to where sand still dribbled, landing on Gabriel’s blankets.
He darted over to grab her arm and stop her from doing something impulsive.
But, curse it all, he’d moved too vampire-fast out of concern, and she jerked back from him, her eyes widened.
Oddly, he didn’t so much care what she thought about him right now.
“Stamp’s coming,” he repeated, as if she hadn’t heard the first time. “You want to be out there, too?”
Something flickered in her gaze, and her voice turned cold, even rougher than it’d been before. “
No one
should be out there.”
“Then cut it out, Mariah. Chaplin’s gonna be back soon. He’ll be okay.”
She took in a long, tremulous breath, her gaze changing once again, allowing him to see for the first time the complete terror in her green eyes. It’d taken over any bluster or bravado, and she seemed just as bare as she’d been last night, when her skin had called to him.
Her vulnerability struck Gabriel so hard that his instincts got the best of him. Fear. Invigorating, inviting
fear
. His fangs nudged, his gaze heated, his voice twisted as he spoke.
“D alt be afraid.” He realized too late that his words were coated in hypnotic sway. It’d just . . . happened, and he couldn’t take it back.
In spite of all the fight she’d put up before, she was in a perfect state of openness now, with her best friend outside and in possible danger. Her defenses were already so wilted that her gaze went soft at the sound of his words, her head tilting back slightly while she got tangled in them.
Falling,
he thought. He’d been successful enough to finally make her fall under his power, and he was here to catch her. He
liked
being the one to do it.
But though she’d lowered her guard, there was still an inner wall holding her up, one last mental barrier, and it blocked him from reading her beyond the surface.
“Mariah,” he said again, and that wall wavered, as if it might not actually exist.
Her heartbeat resembled low, raging chords, strings taut and played by his voice until something dark and rough-edged ran through him, too. The blend of her vital signs drew him even closer, and aside from Mariah’s angrier disposition, the sounds reminded him of the night he’d gone to Abby when she’d been lying on her bed, so near to giving up on everything.
He pulled Mariah closer to him. “Just trust me. . . .”
Need kicked at him, and he imagined piercing her, brutally sucking and taking.
Mariah’s eyes drifted closed, but remained halfway open, her mouth parting on a mellowed exhalation.
And with that breath, he could feel her letting go of the hurt, but not anything else. Not her guard.
Even so, her pulse became his—strong, livid—and he leaned toward her, attracted to the rage, pressing his face to her neck, his lips on her jugular. Each beat rammed into him, and he tasted her skin: salty, sweet, hot. Saliva pooled in his mouth, stinging his jaws, making the emergence of his fangs smooth.
His vision pounded hot, keeping time with her, with them. He wanted to bite but was somehow able to hold back, reveling in how this particular hunt had differed from the ones he practiced so often. It had more clarity. It existed on a different tier of violence, more personal, that made him want to rip into her before the inevitable blackout came on him. It conjured a shaking urge that made him want to feel every moment of blood washing through him until he came out feeling as he had whenever he’d been around Abby.
But Mariah wasn’t the same as Abby. Would never be. Abby had never made him
this
ready to brutalize.
Resting one hand at the back of Mariah’s head, Gabriel grabbed her hair, easing her back so that her neck arched. He wanted more of her. More of an expanse of flesh, more area for him to explore and sniff and agonize over before he drove into her.
Beneath his lips, he could feel the vibration of a groan in her throat, and her last sign of resistance traveled in him, too. Her sounds, his sounds. Her blood, his, just as Abby’s blood should’ve been his . . .
When Mariah groaned again, louder, he heard her body rhythms change—from slow to fast, from smooth to restless. All her chords sawed through him.
He lifted his head, separating himself from the fantasy he’d fallen into. He looked at her face through his warped sight. Really looked.
Mariah’s face.
Ten the lust kicked back in. Not just any lust.
Blood
lust—hot, pulsing, needful. The type of crazy he’d been able to endure up until now because of the promise of someday finding redemption with a woman who made it seem so possible.
But he knew that this wasn’t the way he’d get redemption—the validation that he could exist outside a hideout, among others, passing for anything but a bad guy.
He covered Mariah’s neck with his free hand, as if to block it off from his senses, and then he let go of her hair.
“Don’t remember,” he whispered, swaying her with as much power as he could, hoping it’d work a second time and she’d come out of this with a blank slate.
Then he lowered her to the floor and began to count down. The closer he got to zero, the readier he got to defend himself from any explosive waking reaction.

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