To Crave a Blood Moon (10 page)

Ruby ran harder, faster, legs pumping through yellowed fog. Her breath fell quick and hard, filling her ears like the endless buzzing of a clock. Ahead she spotted her house with the giant cypress tree draped beside it. Curtains of moss hung from the branches and drifted in the breeze.
Yes, yes, yes
.

If she just reached it, if she just made it inside…

Heat flared in her back, needle-lancing pain that spread outward. She toppled down with a sharp cry. Flipping over, she fought, arching, hissing and scratching at her attacker—the beast that would have her if she did not fight, if she did not resist. She lashed out, striking, hitting. Her fists connected with something hard.

“Ruby! Ruby!”

Her eyes flew open. She gulped down stale air and focused on the shadowy figure above her. The sharp lines and gaunt planes of a man's face blurred in and out before her.

“Ruby, settle down. Don't fight it. You're making it worse.”

“Sebastian,” she breathed heavily, as if having run a great distance and reached the end, the finish line.

She took a quick glance around their fogless space.
She was still stuck in the cell, nowhere near her home. Nowhere near Amy, beast or not. The girl was dead. Despite Ruby's promise to help her. She brushed a hand against her cheek, wincing at her fiery flesh and the wetness that could only be tears. The pain in her back came again. It burned through her, radiating throughout her entire body. She moaned, arms clutching at her middle.

“What's happening to me?”

“You're transitioning.”

She shook her head, not understanding, her brain felt thick, thoughts sluggish, like the drip of syrup from a spout.

He pulled her into her arms, holding her tightly. And she let him, clung to him, listened to the hard thump of his heart against her ear.
Not a monster. Not a monster
. He couldn't be… she wouldn't have done what she did with a monster, wouldn't relish the hard press of his body, a predator who would devour her…

Shudders shook her. She moaned, fighting his embrace.

Sympathy
. It felt good. The arms strong, supportive.

He hugged her tighter, compassion rolling off him and into her. She stopped fighting. His heartbeat sounded louder against her ear. “Don't fight it, Ruby. Don't resist. It will go easier for you.”

“I don't understand.” She turned her face, her lips
brushing his chest as she spoke. With a will of its own, her tongue darted out to taste salty skin. Her eyes burned, tears pricking at the corners and she clung to him tighter, pressed her body closer, moaned at the sudden needy clench of her belly.

He gasped, his arms squeezing her back, tightening even more around her. A shot of desire trickled through the awful, aching burn of hunger dwelling inside him.
Liquid-hot want
.

She latched onto it, her fingers digging into his arms, clinging. “Yes,” she growled. “Take me. Please. Again.”

Then his desire faded. The flame dimming, dying. For the arrival of a new emotion.

Sour regret. Heavy grief.

He gripped her arms. Dragged her away from him.

She shook her head, hair tossing, catching in her mouth.

“You don't really want that. You just want to escape the—” He stopped and she knew he was trying to think of a way to make the truth sound better—not so bad. She got that, but she wouldn't accept it. She had to know what was happening. Why he felt so sorry for her.

“What? Tell me,” she gritted through teeth clenched tight against the sweep of tearing heat in her bones and muscles… incinerating pain.

“Your death.”

Her belly cramped, the terrible sensation reminiscent of other times. Sometimes she accidentally flipped to a news station when the horrific footage of a shooting flashed across the screen, zooming in on a victim writhing pain. But then she could flip the channel and sever the connection before her nose started gushing blood.

She couldn't flip the channel right now. She could only endure. A deep keening moan poured from her lips.

This time the pain was her own. The death she felt hers.

Her lids drifted shut. Blackness rolled in.

Sebastian flexed his hands and eased them off Ruby, even though the heat of her skin felt good—
she
felt good. Warming to his cold, cold flesh. But he couldn't let himself touch her any longer. Not with his own agony ripping through him. Not with her words ringing in his ears.
Take me
. It had killed him not to oblige, not to sink into her softness and forget where they were.

Knowing he had to, he lowered her back down and dragged himself to his side of the cell. Away from her. His gaze fixed on her where she curled into a small ball. Even mindless with the fever, her human DNA
dying, making room for the new, his pulse leapt at the sight of her. His cock hardened in the chill air, remembering the warmth of her tightness.

During transition, she was weak, feverish, vulnerable.
Willing
. It would be so easy…

He cursed and dragged a hand over his face, shoving down the base, dark instincts at war inside him. He couldn't do that. The one time had been bad enough. But even as he told himself this, he knew he might have to. A lycan fed and fucked. Not always in that order. Right now, he was operating at their level. His state of starvation blinded him to all his long-held principles. To the humanity and morals pounded in him by his mother, and then his brother—a far better man than he.

He fully intended to survive this. To kill Gunter. And Yusuf. All of them. The entire pack. With great and slow pleasure. And then Ruby would be all right. Her curse would be broken. She would be human again. He would make all this up to her.

Make it up to her?
He dropped his head back to beat against the wall.

Where the hell had that sentiment come from? His life wasn't one of sentimentality. There was no room in it for anything besides hunting down the bastards like the ones upstairs. That hadn't changed. There wasn't room in his world for her.

He wasn't like his brother. He didn't go for missions of mercy. Didn't get married and do the whole domestic thing. He hadn't lost so much of himself that he didn't remember who he was. And who he would be again when all of this was over.

Who Ruby Deveraux was would fail to matter to him then. It had to.

The sound of the door scraping open woke her.

She lifted herself on limbs that felt surprisingly light and limber given her cotton-stuffed head. Holding a hand against her eyes, she blinked against the light flooding the room through the door, limning several large figures.
Lycans
.

She tensed at their arrival, at the strange emptiness they emitted. Now she could identify that bleak gray she felt.
Evil
. Noxious as toxic gas.

She pressed fingers to her lips, as if that would stop the rising tide of bile in her throat. She felt sick from it—
them
—and sicker yet when she remembered she was one of them now. A lycan that would feed on the next moonrise.

“Sebastian,” she murmured, even as she resented that she should call out to him, that she had come to rely on him. Need him so much. Her lifeline in this
frightening new world. Her gaze found him, already standing across from her, his body poised and ready, taut as wire worked tight.

Then she felt him.
Rage. Killing fury
. Dark suspicion radiated from him.

His palms pressed flat against the stone wall as though he might use it for leverage and spring at any moment. His naked body was whipcord-lean, reminding her of a hungry jungle cat. Whatever they had in store for them, he would fight it.

“Disappointing.” Gunter and the others surveyed them with gleaming eyes. Sighing, the alpha strolled deeper inside the room with his hands clasped behind him. “We've trouble coming. We've lost contact with our allies to the west. I haven't the time or patience for this anymore. If you're with us or not, let it be decided now.”

“I'm not.”

Her chest swelled with relief, her heart clenching with emotion. He meant it. She knew…
felt
that he spoke the truth. He would die first before killing her.

Gunter cocked his head. “Strange. You hunt and kill lycans.” He waved a hand at Ruby. “Precisely what she now is. Yet you would choose your own death over hers.”

Her eyes locked on his across the distance, her
vision faultless. She saw the light twisting at the centers of his eyes. His voice fell hard.
Angry
. “It's what it will do to me. Turn me into one of you fuckers,” he bit out. Ruby flinched. Of course. It had nothing to do with her. He cared nothing for her. He didn't want to be like them.
Her
.

Time suspended. No one spoke, moved, breathed.

Without turning her head, Ruby's gaze shifted to stare at Sebastian, the tight set of his lips in his unshaven face, afraid to be the one to upset the eerie stalemate.

Gunter's thick accents cracked the silence. “Hold her.”

Ruby shot to her feet just as they came at her. She tried to break past. Impossible. A lycan flung her back. She struck the wall with bone-jarring force. Stunned, she lolled there, the air left her body in a rush of wind.

Sebastian lunged off his wall with a sound more animal than man. Three lycans fell on him, holding him back. Restrained, he watched as Yusuf caught her up in his arms and forced her before Gunter. She felt like a helpless kitten in the lycan's paws.

The alpha squared off in front of her, unsheathing a fierce-looking knife, the blade glinting like their eyes when caught in light.

“It won't kill you, but it will hurt.” He shook his head, as though apologetic over that fact. With a nod
at Sebastian, he added, “But there'll be lots of blood. Precisely what's needed to get our friend to behave as he ought and stop being so reticent.” The alpha's mouth thinned into a tight line, his gaze sliding over her in consideration.

It dawned on her then. Cold horror washed over her.

He was deciding where to cut.

“No!” She struggled against the hard hands clamped on her arms.

Gunter slid a step closer, holding the blade oddly before him, turning it sideways as though taking measure. “Sssh. Don't struggle,” he murmured, his free hand grabbing a fistful of her hair.

She fought, kicking in a frenzy. She felt several strands rip from her head, but she still could not break free.

“He's turning!” shouted one of the lycans holding Sebastian.

Ruby stilled, tearing her gaze from the blade's mesmerizing gleam to watch. Fresh horror filled her as Sebastian twisted and writhed, his skin pulling and… expanding. He hunkered at the waist, his back curving deeply as he bent, turning into the very thing they wanted to use and manipulate so badly.

Gunter exhaled, the sound reverent, satisified. “Yes. That's it.”

Sebastian unfolded into a standing position, throwing the other lycans off him. She forgot about the painful grip on her hair, about Yusuf's hard hands on her, about the blade pointing in her direction.

She could only stare at Sebastian. Her eyes felt enormous, dry and unblinking in her face, as she drank in the sight of him, similar to the monstrous lycans, but with sleeker lines, less hair. Muscle and sinew rippled his large frame.

“Yes,” she echoed, as he broke through the lycans rising up to take him.

Cool purpose flowed from him; the only anger she felt was controlled, directed at their captors. Not her.

Relief rolled through her. He wasn't like them. He would help her, would stop them—

Pain.
Searing force drove deep into her stomach, burning upward through her chest and throat—fire and agony. She opened her mouth on a scream that never came. Blood filled her mouth. Her nose. Choked her.

She hunched forward against the terrible pressure, gagging and coughing, blood spattering from her lips, fingers digging into the arm that seemed connected to her body, to the handle of a knife buried deep in her. There was a grinding scrape of blade against her bone.

The hands on her arms loosened, dropping away. She staggered forward, clung to Gunter, clutching
him in a parody of a hug, her mouth wide in a silent cry. Blood gurgled at the back of her throat.

Just when she thought the pain couldn't get worse, Gunter buried the blade deeper, sliding it higher, ripping upward. Her body jerked. Tears blurred her vision as her body convulsed, dying.

Gunter slid the blade free from her body. His voice sounded far away, as if he called from under water. “Resist her now, dog.”

He vanished, moving toward the door in a blur. She fell to the ground, rolling onto her back.

Sebastian arrived, dropping heavily beside her.

The bolt slid home, the loud clank reverberating over her harsh breath, each inhalation slowed, slowing, then stilling.

Was she dead? Cold swept through her. Emptiness. No more pain, at least. Just a strange peace. Ease.

Blood covered her, sputtering from her lips as she tried to speak. The metallic odor filled her nose.

Sebastian leaned over her. She stared up into his horribly beautiful face, a creature of nightmares, skin a gleaming bronze where hair did not cover. His lips parted, peeling back from his teeth. Fingers like talons gripped her arms and pulled her toward him.

As his face neared, descending, she let loose a choked sob. This was it. They had broken him. He would have her now.

His touch returned her to the pain. To living agony. It forced her head up off the ground with a shrill cry.

Agony drowned him, swimming with the frothing fury and hunger. It pressed down on her like a great, heavy blanket from which she could not escape. His hard hands flexed around her arms and she hissed, tossing her head. Sebastian stared from her face to her stomach… to the open, blood-gushing wound there.

It was a strange thing smelling one's own blood. So much blood. She remembered Gunter's words. His assurance that this wouldn't kill her. Only it would. The wound spilled too much blood… the sight, the scent, the copious amount would break the last of Sebatian's will.