What Happens in Vegas...After Dark (10 page)

I threw my wings back on instinct, breaking the makeshift cocoon. The owner-bartender’s furious glare shot to the mess that encroached upon the bar’s teak surface, and he barked, “Finish him the hell up so you can clean up that mess!”

On a keening whimper, Ryan’s head fell backward. His throat lay open, blood trickling from twin holes on either side of his pale neck, soaking his thick, black curls. His eyes rolled back into his head, the lids fluttering closed seconds later.

Oh, no, he didn’t!

Forcing the lids open, this time with the prying of my freshly declawed fingertips, I shoved my face almost tight to his. “Tell me the truth!”

His eyes rolled forward again, with the subtle shake of his head. It was barely a movement, and yet it felt like the biggest signal of my life.

He wasn’t going to say the words. The bastard was going to make me kil him. Loathing channeled acid up my throat and my heart lurched with remorse as I snarled, “Then you’re going to die.”

He didn’t say a word in his defense. Maybe he couldn’t. Maybe he really was already too far gone, his soul departed and his body kicking with final nerves.

If he was stil here, it would take no more than resuming the slide of my pussy along his stiff cock to drain the frail remnants of his life force. It would take no more than that if I wanted him to continue to suffer.

Ryan had left me no choice but to exact my revenge. But I would take it as swiftly and painlessly as possible from this point onward.

Rocking back on my bent legs, lifting free of his erection as I went, I cracked my wings against the air. Dual energy bursts emerged at their tips. The chanting of the crowd of supernaturals fel to a chorus of anxious gasps.

The large, fiery, furiously spinning circles that hovered an inch from my wings weren’t like the harmless energy burst I’d raised in the rental house as a source of light. These ones were all-powerful, and laced with enough dark fury and concentrated acid to turn their target into a boneless, bloodless pile of ash on contact.

Pulse thrumming at my neck, regret eating at my belly, I brought my wings back and took aim. His eyes flickered open. Honesty filled them. Honest and open love that stilled the air in my throat.

“Deitre,” a low voice rasped.

I thought it was his. That he’d somehow managed to infiltrate my mind, because his lips sure hadn’t moved. Then I recognized the voice.

Zipping my attention over my shoulder, I met with the impossible. With Jada. Only, not the Jada I remembered. But a shimmering, nearly translucent gray version of her head and a small portion of her upper body.

What the hell, was I the one that was dreaming? I’d heard of the dead returning as vapors in times of extreme need, but I’d always believed it nothing more than hearsay.

“Jada?” Her name trembled from my lips.

She didn’t nod. Didn’t flinch. Her gray-washed eyes didn’t even blink as she offered in that same, low raspy voice, “It wasn’t his fault. He didn’t kill me. I was already dead.”

I had to be dreaming. Making up words I yearned to hear. “No. It was his fault. If he’d gotten you out of there, they could have revived you.”

“They couldn’t have,” she argued without emotion, without expression. “I set the fire, Deitre.”

My pounding heart missed a beat. What was she suggesting? Why was she? “It started on the other end of the building. You were asleep.”

“I wasn’t asleep. I was dying. I wanted to die.”

Shock slid over me. I gasped, “You killed yourself?”

“Yes. I set the fire and then went back to my apartment and took a bottle of sleeping pil s. I wasn’t happy. Not even when I thought Ryan loved me. Don’t blame him, Deitre.

He did nothing but his job.”

“You can’t believe—” My fervent reply stopped short as Jada’s ashen face and upper body vanished in a flash of yellow-orange smoke.

It wasn’t friendly smoke, but the toxic kind from the fire at the processing plant. It drained me in an instant. Left me to fall helpless against Ryan’s dying body. Left the energy bursts I’d forgotten all about in the wake of Jada’s appearance, to unfurl on their target.

Before, that target had been Ryan. The bursts were stil directed at him. But now, my body was between him and the bursts. Now it was my wings and back they slammed into as a maelstrom of singeing light and acerbic power too strong for even a succubus to withstand.

Ryan

“Open your eyes, Ryan.”

They were the words that Deitre had spoken to lift me from unconsciousness into a hellish nightmare that had morphed to hellish reality. But these words weren’t hers. These words were spoken by a man.

I could feel his hands on my body as I surfaced from a trancelike sleep. Huge and rough, his fingers ran over every inch of my nude frame. They lingered on the pain that seared the sides of my neck and then moved south to caress my softened cock.

As was the case when it had been Deitre’s hands on my body, I wasn’t sure that I had the strength to open my eyes. Adrenaline changed that. Adrenaline born of disgust had my eyes snapping open. My surroundings hadn’t changed. I was still flat on my back on the bar. The blatantly throbbing music was gone, but excited voices still fil ed the semidarkness and a hundred-plus supernatural creatures still eyed me from the dance floor, the balcony and other vantages throughout the club.

The fingers circled around my shaft, and the man stroked my cock with intensity. I turned my glare on his face. Then looked higher when my eyes met with his chest. He was a huge black being, his body roped with muscle and his stance at least seven feet. His dark, narrowed features resembled those of a hawk, and I could guess he had wings similar to the ones I’d seen on Deitre retracted into his body.

He could snap me in half easily. But then, I’d already written myself off as dead once.

Somehow, I hadn’t died. And I wasn’t dying while some hulking birdman attempted to get me off.

Glaring, I pushed to a sitting position and fisted my hand around his wrist. Christ, my fingers barely even folded halfway around. His slanted pale blue eyes landed on mine, and I growled, “What the fuck are you doing?”

“Healing you.” His voice wasn’t deep and coarse, as expected, but soft and low. He looked past me, down the bar top. “It was her dying request.”

Even as I acknowledged that my pain was gone, that he somehow had healed me, my gut roiled with viciousness. I knew what would be on the bar behind me before I turned to look. Who would be there.

Deitre.

Her wings and tail were gone. Though she lay naked, someone had arranged the length of her thick, red hair around her body to cover her breasts. The pasty shade of her skin and her unblinking eyes pushed bile up the back of my throat.

Jesus, she couldn’t be gone.

“She’s dead?” My voice shook.

I should have been thrilled to see her lifeless after what she’d revealed. That I’d never truly known her. That the only reason she’d entered my life was to render my death. That she really was some kind of she-devil. But I wasn’t thril ed. My heart squeezed painfully, and I felt like I was going to be sick again.

Looking back at birdman, who’d finally released my cock, I shook my denial. “She can’t be dead. You have to save her.”

“My magic is no match for her powers.”

Dammit, how could he sound so sedate when a woman, or demon or whatever the hell she was, lay dead a few feet away?

Rage cruising through me, I shoved off the bar to land on my feet. Now, birdman looked even bigger. More than twice my weight and closer to eight feet than seven.

Ignoring his size and the ogling of my naked body by our creature audience, I demanded,

“What is a match for her powers? Something has to be.”

“You’re the only one here who can help her now,” the big, burly demon-looking dude behind the bar offered. His voice wasn’t dripping concern, either, but at least he’d given me something to work with.

It was up to me to save Deitre. The question was how and, deep down, did I even want to do that?

I couldn’t remember much after she’d slipped around my cock and suggested she was going to fuck me to death. Just traces of conversation I hadn’t been able to open my mouth to respond to, and then a flicker of Jada’s face. Only, it hadn’t been her flesh-and-blood face. She’d looked like a film on the air. She’d given me absolution.

Relief to know that I hadn’t been the reason for Jada’s death washed over me. Then it was forgotten as my tension and terror remounted.

Jada was dead. I refused to let Deitre be, as well. Maybe I hadn’t known her. Maybe I had no reason to believe I’d ever loved her. But saving lives was all but innate in my blood and I knew I would never be truly free of the nasty shit in my head, which had started with that fire a year ago, if I didn’t attempt to save Deitre.

Going to her, I slipped my arms beneath her body and tugged her to the edge of the bar top. She was limp in my arms, but she wasn’t cold.

I looked back at birdman with pleading eyes. “How do I save her?”

“Her powers aren’t as strong on her own body as they would be on others. The energy bursts didn’t burn away her muscle and bone, but they did steal her blood. The only blood that runs through her body now is that which she drank from you. If she has any chance, then she needs more of your blood. Much more.”

In other words, I had to walk right back into the sizzling hell I’d experienced when she’d sunk her fangs into my throat. Shuddering with my fate, I again turned to the birdman. “How do I get her to drink?”

“With your wrist to her mouth. If she can sense you, she’ll drink. If she can’t, no one can help her.”

Breathing a sigh to know it wasn’t my throat that would be involved this time, I brought my free hand to Deitre’s mouth and used my wrist to part her lips.

Unlike her body, her mouth was cold, numbly so. It didn’t warm as I kept my wrist there, pressing it hard against her lips, considering biting into it myself to get the blood flooding. “Drink, dammit!”

Her eyes remained unblinking, her body limp in my arms. Her lips moved. Her teeth nipped at my skin. A delicate touch at first, a tender caress. And then jarring, searing pain as the blunt edge of her front teeth broke into my skin.

I winced as the ache intensified, burning throughout my arm and into my entire body, swayed a bit as a wave of dizziness moved through me. Birdman was behind me in an instant.

Pressing his hulking body against my naked back to stabilize me, he explained, “She lost her fangs. She has only mortal teeth to rely on now.”

Yeah, and mortal teeth obviously weren’t meant for tearing into flesh and sucking blood.

Closing my eyes, I shut out the morbid pain, the feel of birdman holding me upright.

The knowledge the creature crowd was probably enjoying the hell out of their entertainment. Seconds turned to minutes and then more. Finally, birdman said, “That’s enough. Any more and I won’t be able to heal you again.”

I opened my eyes to look back at him. My pain was still there, but it was more of a dul , throbbing ache now. Apparently, I’d adjusted to feeling like a piece of human meat. “Is it enough?”

“Only time will tell.” He brought his beefy hand over mine and lifted my wrist from her throat. The rub of his thumb across the ragged teeth marks sealed the skin in an unbelieving heartbeat. “Sit now. You need—”

“I’m fine,” I snapped, shaking my shoulders to get his body away from mine. He stepped back with a grunt. I swayed instantly to the right, catching myself on the lip of the bar seconds before my face would have rammed into the teak. Straightening, I shook off the dizzy spell. “I’ll be fine. I don’t belong here.”

Birdman nodded. “Then go. But know that you can’t come back. Once you pass through the door, this club will cease to exist to your eyes. You may never know if she survives.”

“Good.” It was better that way. As much as I wanted Deitre to survive, needed it with an intensity that was illogical, I didn’t want to know that she had.

If I didn’t know that she was alive, I wouldn’t feel the need to go looking for her. I wouldn’t wonder if anything we’d shared the last weeks had been real. I wouldn’t have to face the fierce beating of my heart that suggested even now, after al that happened, I still loved her.

Deitre

The reason most humans were scared of the unknown was because it was just that, unknown. Personally, I’d always thrilled in it. I loved being a succubus. I loved the reality that nothing was beyond the realm of imagination.

But I wasn’t a succubus anymore. And I was scared shitless of the unknown.

Karen had been nice enough to let me shack up with her the last few days, on the pretense that I’d made the moony-ass mistake of moving in with some guy and had immediately regretted it and had given up my old apartment in the meantime. In between swapping spit with her fiancé and running her café in the Liege, she’d fed me enough calorie and carb-laced sweets to have my mortal backside spreading.

It was going to take some getting used to, this whole human thing. But it wasn’t that unknown that scared me as I turned Karen’s hatchback onto Ryan’s street. It was the unknown of how he would respond when I showed up on his doorstep.

Probably, I was crazy to be going to his house. But I couldn’t leave things the way they were now. At the very least, I had to let him know that he’d saved me.

My belly flitted with butterflies as I pulled into his drive and stepped out of the car.

Getting used to these new emotions was going to take some time, as well. I’d experienced emotions as a demon, but never this intensely.

Feeling like tears of apprehension were about to burst from my eyes, I bypassed the garage entrance to cut across the grass to the front door. Before I could knock, it opened.

Ryan stood there, looking so good, with his breeze-tousled black curls and nothing covering his kil er bod but a pair of gray cotton shorts, it took my breath away. My pulse pounded at my temples until I was squinting with the force of the pressure.