Cunningham, Pat - Legacy [Sequel to Belonging] (Siren Publishing Ménage Amour) (34 page)

“Nobody move,” the blonde vampire snapped. Instantly, the women froze in place. This was a vampire they knew and had been conditioned to obey. She fixed her red-eyed glare on Wallace. Her eyes grew wide, and the crimson retreated, revealing their natural brown. “You’ve got to be kidding me.
You’re
the Tin Man?”

Colleen backed toward the fireplace, away from the captives and their vampire mistress. Let Wallace handle this. He was the slayer here.

Except Wallace stood as frozen as the women, staring, like them, at the blonde. His pale face had gone even whiter. His heart beat once, then died.

The blonde recovered first. Her red lips stretched in an awful smile, her fangs on clear display. “I’ll be damned. Well, that’s a given, but you know what I mean. Wallace Hamilton. How long has it been? Thirty years? More like forty. Forty fucking years since you just stood there and let them drag me away.” She took a step forward, slightly crouched. “So, lover. How you been?”

Wallace swallowed hard around a breath he didn’t need. His single spoken word came out in a tortured croak. “Elisa.”

* * * *

Colleen’s head spun as its universe had its legs kicked out from under it. Wait, it wasn’t her head. It was Wallace’s. The psychic bond between them flared with a vengeance. The full force of his shock hit her like a sucker punch to the gut, followed by every wrenching twist of horror, regret, and guilt currently flooding his mind. She grabbed at the mantel of the faux fireplace to keep herself on her feet.

Elisa Rios. One of the Woods and Waters bloodlines. Taken by vampires to serve as a broodmare. The mother of Wallace’s murdered infant son. Not as dead and gone as all of them, especially Wallace, had been led to believe.

“Will you look at you.” She glided forward another step. Wallace took a corresponding step backward. He probably wasn’t even aware he’d moved. He didn’t seem aware of anything beyond the undead woman before him.

“You’re older than I remember,” she went on. “You must have waited a while before you made the turn. About ten years, it looks like.” She moved again. He backed away. “In all that time, you never once looked me up to see how I was doing.”

“I thought you were dead.” He made as if to approach her. She bared her canines at him, and he stopped. “For Christ’s sake, vampires took you. Who even knew they were real? I didn’t know what to do, where to start looking. I looked anyway. I tried, baby. I did everything I could.”

“Uh-huh. I guess ‘everything’ includes giving up after a couple of months. Want to know what I was up to? I was getting my blood sucked out of me every night. I was fed bat blood till I thought I’d gag. I got pounded by horny vampires on a regular basis until they knocked me up. And what did I get for it all?” She surged forward another two feet. Wallace retreated accordingly. “Another useless son. This one didn’t live to draw three breaths. He made his mark, though. He ripped his way out of my womb before he died. No more children for me. My grand destiny, my whole reason for being, wrecked at the starting gate.”

She halted her forward progress and actually straightened in pride. “Fortunately, Felix had taken a liking to me. The others would have drained me and trashed the body, but Felix knew I could still be useful. He turned me. He became my husband. He was a better lover than you ever were.” Her snarl reappeared, and she moved toward Wallace again. “Until you staked him the other night.”

“I didn’t know,” Wallace repeated. Colleen shuddered inwardly at the thinness of his voice. This wasn’t the Wallace who made her heart race. All his strength and cockiness had deserted him. “I did try to find you, I swear. I never would have left you to suffer.”

“I’ll just bet you tried. Just like you tried to be straight.” Her voice dropped to a mocking approximation of Wallace’s sexy growl. “‘Of course I like women. It’s all about you, baby.’ Really? Then explain that moose in the other room. Does he do it for you better than I did? Don’t try to lie to me,
baby
. You were glad when they grabbed me. You couldn’t wait to go back to men. Got yourself a real flock going, don’t you? Your precious bat bitch and a half-breed slut.”

Colleen stiffened. The vampire’s scathing insult snapped the paralysis Wallace’s shock had inadvertently thrown over her. With her head clear, Colleen instantly recognized the danger Wallace hadn’t—that Elisa was herding him toward the uncovered window and its deadly shafts of sun.

She didn’t stop to think. She threw herself at the she-bat. With a good running start and her greater-than-a-regular-human’s strength, she stood a good chance of slamming her stake home in a surprise attack. She might even score a telling blow.

At least, that was the plan. Her greater-than-human strength wasn’t greater than a vampire’s speed. The blonde spun. The stake missed. She hooked her arm around Colleen’s neck. Colleen’s stake clattered against the wall, just barely missing the TV. Fangs flashed into Colleen’s line of sight, and a hiss with no breath behind it scalded her cheek.

“Right. The little troublemaker. Looks like I’d better deal with you now.” Elisa jerked her head at Wallace. “Hold him, girls.”

The slaves moved en masse and swarmed over Wallace. He hit the floor with nearly a dozen vampire-strong women on top of him. In their haste to obey, they knocked him away from the window. Colleen’s relief lasted maybe a second. Right now, she had her own problems. She thrashed with all her considerable strength in the vampiress’s grip and hunched her shoulders to make her neck as small a target as possible.

“You’re a handful,” Elisa admitted. “Gutsy, too. I can use a new assistant, now that Kitsune’s gone.” Her fangs flashed again. Colleen braced herself for the bite. Instead of her throat, however, the blonde ripped open her own wrist. She ground the bloody skin against Colleen’s mouth. “Drink up, honey. It’ll make you big and strong.”

Colleen clamped her lips shut and struggled all the harder. The vampire simply held on. Blood seared across Colleen’s mouth. Some of it seeped its way inside. The sharp, heady scent of it stabbed her nostrils. It smelled—

Delicious.

Instincts hibernating in her genes stirred, shook off their decades-long suppression, and sprang to eager life. The need to hunt, to drink, overwhelmed her mind and gut. Suddenly, her throat felt incredibly parched and only one thing could relieve it.

Her lips parted. Barely a hair, but enough. Thick, salty liquid, cold as iced coffee, slipped over her tongue. She swallowed reflexively. One swallow became two, then another, then another.

“That’s my girl,” Elisa crooned. “That’s mommy’s good little bat bitch.”

Somewhere, back in the everyday world, an animal roared its rage, or perhaps its horror. This was followed by grunts and the thumps of several bodies flung every which way. The she-bat’s wrist and its flood of frigid ambrosia was pried away from her mouth. Colleen keened at its loss. Somebody shoved her and she went reeling into the side of the fireplace. She grabbed at the mantel, her head full of fog, her ears full of thunder, her mouth full of vampire blood.

At first, she assumed that blur in the center of the room was due to her eyes not focusing. Gradually, she realized her eyes were just fine. The blur was two battling vampires, Wallace and the blonde. The sounds they made were nowhere close to human.

Colleen swallowed the last of Elisa’s blood and absently licked her lips. Alien thoughts, desires, and needs tornadoed through her brain and body. That awful, parched sensation, now camped in her throat, just wouldn’t go away. If she didn’t appease it, it would drive her mad.

She flicked a glance at the dazed women scattered over the floor and dismissed them. Their scent was too human to draw her. They couldn’t provide what she needed.

Her stare went to the blonde bat locked in combat with her man, her mate, her king. The vampiress thought she was in charge here. Colleen bared teeth that felt inexplicably thicker than normal. There could be only one queen bat in a flock, and it sure as hell wouldn’t be this bitch.

The two vampires broke apart and circled. Elisa passed the fireplace, and Dangerous Colleen sensed opportunity. She darted at the blonde and caught her from behind. The enticing smell of blood beneath the skin told her where to strike. Her overpowering need and new, predator’s instincts drove her teeth into the side of Elisa’s neck.

The vamp’s intended roar twisted into a scream. Elisa clawed at Colleen as a swimmer would at a leech. Colleen hung on and suckled greedily, intent on draining every drop. The wound kept trying to close up, so she had to keep ripping it open. The vampire bucked like a mustang in moves that grew increasingly panicked in an effort to dislodge her attacker. Colleen clamped down harder and drank faster.

A hand closed around her hair and wrenched her head off the vamp’s neck. Colleen snarled at the hand’s owner. Wallace? How dare he interrupt? This blood was
hers
. She snapped at him when he tried to pry her off her prey. Who did he think he was?

His interference gave Elisa her chance. She kicked Colleen away from her then took a swing at Wallace. Colleen stumbled backward, collided with a chair, tripped, and hit the floor hard. She regained her feet in a second, still thirsty, lusting for blood and the kill.

She raked her glare around the room. Elisa and Wallace had closed again and grappled by the window. The vamp’s moves had slowed, and blood stained the front of her halter top. She made a desperate lunge at Wallace’s throat. He dodged her strike and swung her into the sunlight. Her shriek sent Colleen mentally reeling. Wallace pulled out a stake and rammed it full force into the she-bat’s chest. The burnt, screeching thing that had been Elisa Rios shuddered and crumbled to dust.

The sudden silence, mental and physical, acted on Colleen like a dash of frigid water. The world snapped back into focus. She wasn’t a vampire. She didn’t crave blood. That monster wasn’t her mother or mistress or the source of anything she wanted. She was Colleen Brenner, not Forrester, and she was a normal person. Human, in spite of the blood all over her blouse, the taste of blood on her lips and tongue, and the teeth that suddenly felt all sorts of wrong.

A kicked-puppy whimper burst out of her throat and quickly built into a wail.

Instantly, Wallace appeared beside her. He folded her into a bone-cracking bear hug. “It’s okay, sweetheart,” he said in a voice that scared her even more. “You’re okay. It’s gonna be okay.”

More wails and whimpers bit at Colleen’s ears. They didn’t come from her. The women had regained their feet and now milled by the wall in pathetic confusion, as if finally surfacing from a nightmare. Their empty eyes filled up again with a horrible awareness even worse than their previous bovine stares. That same awareness ground its talons into Colleen’s own brain, gleefully intent on baring new truths she didn’t want to face.

“You!” Wallace bellowed at the women. “Get your asses out of here now!
Now!
Move, goddamn it!”

They blinked at him stupidly. Reese Lake bolted first. She darted through the curtain into the restaurant and beyond Colleen’s awareness or caring. She nearly ran down Jeremy, who staggered into the room. He had scratches on his face and forearms and blood in his hair and wetting the side of his face. The sight and smell of it made Colleen’s stomach drop. She desperately wanted to vomit.

Jeremy barely spared the women a glance. He went straight to Colleen. His arms joined Wallace’s in holding her tight. Not even their bodies could warm her or stop her shudders. She tottered on the brink of a faint, but her body denied her its merciful oblivion. Instead, a new, more insistent hunger loomed, this one centered in her belly and spreading out and down. It flared in her crotch and teased with the threat of a violent eruption still to come.

“Shit,” Wallace snarled. His eyes burned as red as the blood on Jeremy’s face. “Jesus fucking son of a bitch.”

“She’s all right,” Jeremy said desperately. He hovered his shaking fingers over her blood-smeared mouth before resting them on her neck. “Not bitten. Look. No bites. She’s all right, Wallace. She’ll be all right.”

“No, she isn’t. She didn’t get bitten. She bit. She drank. This isn’t shock. It’s blood lust.”

Chapter 19

After that, events got blurry. Wallace and Jeremy held a hurried conversation over her head. The words were only sounds that made no sense at all. Her mind tuned back in again at the tail end.