Sentinel's Hunger (2 page)

“Hey, you all right?”

He gritted his teeth and nodded, trying to play off the pain.

She’d caught him by surprise. He wouldn’t let her do it again.

Allan put an arm around his shoulder and led him to a free seat in the waiting area.

“You want me to get a doctor?”

“For gas? Get the hell out of here.” Michael laughed and added for good measure, “It’s the dogs we had earlier. I ate too fast and they’re catching up with me. I’m good.” Especially now that he knew her name and that she wouldn’t die—not this night and not on his watch.

He had other plans for her.

Sentinel’s Hunger

11

Xevera Nanay opened her eyes and blinked once at the off-white ceiling before moving her head from one side and then to the other.

Where was Michael?

She felt the male in her mind. Remnants of his spirit-boost, a rare, regenerative component found in some human blood, and
kundalini
—

his energy and life force—invaded her soul, his clean woodsy musk a heady aphrodisiac the likes of which she had never experienced, stronger than the essence of their earlier target from the club.

How was it possible that she could sense him so intensely when he was nowhere near, that she could know his name, unless…

He was a hybrid. She could feel his uniqueness, his alien blood and she knew he was a
cambion
—born of a human and her people’s erstwhile enemy, the Sebitu.

She had to find him. She needed to taste him. Touch him. She needed his energy, but first she needed to get out of here.

The hunger assailed her anew. She had thought she could handle it, had assured
Quna
Nahemah, her friend and mentor, that she was strong enough to go on one more retrieval mission. She had shamelessly played on their friendship and history to ensure her place with Nahemah’s great grandson and his wife on the retrieval team.

She had assured her
Quna
that she could escort Alex and Genesis into the Great Above and bring back the target and the squad safely.

Xevera had only half-succeeded and worse, she was beginning to doubt her ability to halt the progress of her illness.

She shut her eyes tight at the memory of her utter collapse at the portal, shamed that she had let Alex and Genesis—her
Quna’s
blood
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Gracie C. McKeever

and the chief architects of the New Regime—her team down. She wondered how they fared back in Emsharra. The hunger, however, put an immediate stop to her doubts and mental torment.

Hunger. Need. Pain.
Hunger
.

The sensations pounded through her body in time to the rhythmic beat of the machines monitoring her vital signs, machines that knew not how to address what was going on inside her non-human anatomy, nor could they allay the symptoms of her disorder.

Xevera had not felt this ill since her first experience teleporting.

She staved off the need to retch now only by the most monumental show of will and jerked to a sitting position.

She had taken off the monitoring patches attached to her chest and was in the midst of pulling the intravenous tube from her arm when someone came into the room.

She took a deep breath, nostrils flaring as a familiar masculine scent rode the wind to her, familiar but not
him
—her Michael from the ambulance with the bushy halo of cinnamon-brown hair and the pale gray-blue eyes glinting out of a bronzed face.

He had linked with her just for an instant, but it had been enough to tell her that he could sate her cravings in a way no other human could.

How was it possible that someone so special could have slipped beneath the radar of the Harvesting Program? And might he be her cure?

Xevera watched now as the white-coated man crossed the threshold to her bed. For the time being,
he
would have to suffice her cravings until she could find the one who had touched her insides—

mind and soul—so intimately.

“You’ve suffered a severe shock and you’re in no condition to leave.” The doctor reached out to stop her removing her I.V.

He touched her hand and Xevera’s stomach spasmed.

Quna
had warned her that every day she put off feeding would put herself and her fellow Emsharrans at risk, not to mention any human
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13

she came into contact with.

Xevera gritted her teeth.

She would not succumb as had her mother. She would not be weak like her father. When she’d sworn allegiance to
Quna
, she’d sworn never to bring harm to a human. She had not broken her promise in the alley with the bouncer and she would not break her promise now. She could not.

Xevera closed her eyes tight and moaned, trying to fight off the
need
before whipping her free hand out to catch the doctor’s wrist.

“You are in no position to stop me.”

“What the—”

She pulled him forward, sealing her mouth to his for a sample of his essence. She had to make this quick, did not have time for a full-fledged feeding.

She drove her tongue into his mouth to better feast, as natural as a baby suckling at its mother’s breast, her need the driving force behind her invasion rather than experience or passion. Passion she would save for the other, the
cambion
, the hybrid human.

The doctor struggled against her penetration, pushing his hands into Xevera’s breasts as she hooked an arm around his back to lock him to her. His feet helplessly kicked in the air as she lifted him from the floor, sucking his tongue into her mouth and siphoning his energy.

He thrashed frantically, helplessly, like a big fish on land, and Xevera swallowed his desperate cries until his struggles gradually ceased and his gasps turned to moans.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

Xevera jerked her head up in time to see a woman standing on the threshold of the room, mouth agape.

Would she have stopped if she had not been interrupted?

She did not want to consider her actions further. The possibility that she had been so near to breaking the tenets of the New Regime, much less her own personal credo of protecting humans, was unimaginable to her.

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Gracie C. McKeever

Xevera had only intended to take enough from the man to fortify herself, fill the hole in her center and alleviate her hunger. She had not intended to drain him, but the way he hung limp in her arms, eyes rolling up into his head, told her that she very well might have.

“Get away from him!” The woman rushed across the floor.

Xevera instantly released the doctor and finished pulling the I.V.

out of her arm. The doctor slid to the floor.

She threw back the bed linen and slapped her bare feet on the linoleum floor, barely feeling the cold as she stood on unsteady legs.

The nurse was on her knees beside the doctor, checking the man’s vitals before glancing up at Xevera in shock. “He’s not breathing.

What did you do to him?”

She could not answer, just stripped out of the flimsy gown that the hospital had provided her and prepared to flash out of the room.

Flashing would be less of a risk than teleporting, less stress on her body. Teleporting, though much more expedient, presented a minor hazard even when one had definite coordinates in mind beforehand.

But in her weakened and disoriented condition, with barely an idea of her location, the act would be much more dangerous than flashing, and utter folly.

“Where the hell do you think you’re going? Security!”

Xevera did not wait another second, pushed past the nurse as the woman stood from her crouch to block the exit.

To the nurse and the other ER staff and patients, she was a whirling blur of bright yellow energy as she exploded through the reception area and pneumatic doors out into the parking lot.

Xevera was almost a mile away from the hospital before she came to a stop, leaning against a dumpster near the entrance of an alley as she panted and perspired with her efforts.

This was unacceptable!

She should have fed from the nurse, too, before escaping, but that option was almost as unpalatable as starving to death or killing a human. She knew many Inanna, her kind, who fed on humans of their
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15

same sex—usually for sport and out of preference rather than necessity. It was not an uncommon practice for Sisters to pleasure or feed on each other in between feeding from humans, but Xevera, as Genesis had once put it, did not ‘swing that way.’

She smiled at the thought of her friend and Sister, hoped Genesis and her mate Alex had made it back to Emsharra safely, and wondered what
Quna
Nahemah was thinking of her absence.

Xevera knew The Highest would not risk a rescue unless she felt Xevera was in danger or unable to defend herself and get back home on her own. Unless Alex and Genesis had relayed Xevera’s condition at the portal,
Quna
would have no reason to send in help before protocol dictated. Except that Nahemah knew of Xevera’s illness, which far outweighed her fitness as Sentinel-in-Command.

Former
Sentinel-in-Command
.

Xevera gritted her teeth in frustration. Her
Quna
had trusted her, had counted on her ability to stave off the hunger and complete one more mission. She did
not
want that trust to go in vain, did not want to be the reason for a premature extraction! Most importantly, she did not want her
Quna
to compromise her principals anymore than she had already for Xevera.

She did not need rescuing—not from herself or from the humans.

True, she had not been on her own in the Great Above in centuries, had not been left to her own devices for feeding her need of
kundalini
, but surely she could survive a pithy two days in the human world. She might not be as experienced in the ways of humans as Genesis, who had spent twenty-eight years in exile among them before finding her mate in Alex, but Xevera was
not
helpless.

“Hey babe, ya lost your clothes or somethin’?”

“Yeah, maybe we could help ya find ‘em.”

Xevera glanced up from her bare feet, suddenly realizing that she was naked. Her eyes locked onto the two unkempt young men standing at the mouth of the alley.

She did not fear them, even in her weakened state, nor was she
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Gracie C. McKeever

ashamed to be naked in their presence. Inanna were as comfortable in only their skin as they were in clothes. Though she had fully intended to conjure up appropriate attire as soon as she recovered enough, it mattered not to her that these two men saw her in her natural state.

What did concern her was their proximity to the entrance of the alley and their very real goal to block her from leaving.

Xevera could smell their malevolence, their arousal and intent as they advanced.

Cautiously, she backed up and prepared to defend herself.

* * * *

“You’re throwing in the towel so early?”

Michael drained the rest of the beer from his longneck and slapped a ten on the finished cherry bar. “I’m done.”

“But it’s barely past midnight.”

“And we’ve got an early shift tomorrow.”

“Ah, you’re no fun, old man.”

Michael gave his partner an indulgent smile. He sympathized and remembered what it was like to be twenty-four, horny, single and on the prowl. But he had responsibilities, the most prominent being their last run of the night.

He couldn’t explain it, didn’t understand the pull, but he knew if he didn’t go back to the hospital to check on Xevera, he wouldn’t be able to sleep tonight. Of course, the semi-erection he’d been sporting since leaving the hospital that evening might have a little to do with his insomnia, if he was being honest with himself.

He knew several women, specifically nurses and doctors at the hospital who would have been too happy to help him with his problem, but he didn’t want any of them, hadn’t wanted any woman in a long time.

“I bet I know where you’re off to when you leave here.”

Michael arched a brow and waited, more out of curiosity than
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17

concern.

He’d never had a sense that Allan was in any way gifted and vaguely wondered if it was possible the guy had been reading him all evening without him knowing. He didn’t think so. He had grown pretty skilled at reading people and knowing who was like him, even on the smallest scale, and who wasn’t. It surprised him that there were as many empaths and telepaths as there were who were not aware of their abilities; he wondered how they couldn’t be.

Michael had known he was different from the moment he started to walk and talk. “Okay, so where am I off to?”

“You’re going back to the hospital to check on that foxy supermodel look-alike.”

Michael grinned, otherwise keeping his expression as neutral as possible. “You got me.”

“Hey, do me a favor?” Allan leaned closed and put a hand on his shoulder.

“What’s that?”

“Find out if she’s really some alien cat woman and how she ended up naked in the alley. Will you do that for me?”

“If she’s awake and I get in to see her, I’ll do that for both of us.”

Michael patted Allan’s back, slid off his barstool, and headed for the exit.

Since he wasn’t that far from the hospital, he bypassed his SUV

parked at the curb and decided to walk the few blocks. The short distance and breezy warm spring air made it ideal conditions to be out for a late night stroll. Besides, he needed the time and open space to clear his head before he saw her again.

The closer he got to the hospital, however, the more he thought it was a bad idea to put himself in the same space as Xevera.

Unconscious, she had a debilitating effect on his misspent libido.

Christ knew what sort of effect she’d have on him when she was awake.

Would she be awake?

18

Gracie C. McKeever

After flatlining, she’d miraculously, instantaneously rebounded without the doctors or nurses having to use the paddles or administer intravenous stimulants. One minute she was gone and the next her eyes were open and she was trying to get down off the gurney before passing out. No freaky shape-shifting episode like with the thing that had attacked his mother, though.