Lilith Saintcrow: Taken

I’m all new now. Except the inside, where I’m the same old Sophie. Scared of my own shadow. She took another gulp of gin and tonic, and someone bumped into her from behind. The drink slopped, splashing, and cold liquid landed on her cleavage. The pins and needles swept over her skin and retreated.

Sophie sucked in a breath, nearly choked, and looked up as the person bumping her settled against the bar less than a foot away.

Oh, wow.

He was tall, and dark, and rough-looking, stubble crawling on his cheeks under high arched cheekbones. His mouth was a little too thin, as was his nose, but his eyes—so dark pupil blended into iris in the uncertain light—were nice. And the shelf of dark hair falling stubbornly across them looked like it was just waiting for fingers to smooth it back. A streak of pale blondness winging back from his temple should have looked ridiculous, but didn’t.

Hello, stranger. Sophie quickly looked back down at her drink. Lucy would have grinned at him and said something witty. Jeez. I’m such an idiot.

“Sorry about that,” he almost-yelled in her ear, easily heard over the music. His breath touched her hair, and a bolt of heat went through her. It was the closest she’d been to a man since…oh, two months before she filed for divorce?

The tingling feeling had gone away. It was probably just the weak gin.

“No problem.” She pitched her voice loud enough to be heard, as well, but yelled into her drink. Being this close to anyone made her nervous. And he was big . The physical size meant danger, and she nervously checked where his hands were with quick little peripheral glances.

You can’t tar everyone with the same brush, she told herself for at least the five thousandth time. Not all men are like that.

The sense of someone breathing on her didn’t go away, and she slid to the side, bumping a tanned woman in a white dress. Too many people in here. I’m going to suffocate. Her gaze swung up, and she found the man looking at her again. A drink had appeared in front of him, and he handed the harried bartender a ten without looking. Black T-shirt, jeans, a belt with an oddly shaped silver buckle.

He was standing too close, too. It was packed three-deep here at the bar, but he was still way inside her personal space.

Like, leaning in so far they were almost rubbing noses. A breath of male scent, some musky cologne, enfolded her.

Her heart gave a nasty, nervous thumping leap. Jesus! Sophie flinched back, dropped her gin and tonic on the bar, and retreated. The glass turned over, sending a tide of watered alcohol across the polished plastic, and a flash of terrified guilt burst reflexively under her rib cage.

Stupid. You’re stupid. Mark’s voice hissed inside her head, and she made it to the dance floor, going up on her toes to look for Lucy. She pushed her glasses up, and hoped they wouldn’t get smudged. That would just cap everything.

Dammit, Lucy. Where have you gone now? But her friend was nowhere in sight. Sophie canvassed the whole dance floor, glanced at the emergency exit, and decided that was silly. Lucy wasn’t at the bar, either—and it wasn’t like her to vanish completely.

Her heart was pounding like it intended to explode, and her breath came short and fast as she checked the ladies’ room and found no Lucy.

Don’t have a panic attack now. Luce wouldn’t bail on you.

But, oh, her body wouldn’t listen. It was bracing itself for something terrible.

Outside, the night was clear and cold, and the wind brushed the back of her sweating legs. It was too hot inside the club, and hypothermic outside. What a choice. Her glasses fogged briefly and cleared. Her breathing eased a little, and the tight knot of squirming panic inside her dialed back a little bit.

There was a group of smokers in a knot around a parking meter, all laughing easily. One of them was a college-age boy, doing some sort of jig to the beat coming through the walls for the enjoyment of his buddies.

But no sleek dark head or jingle of gold bracelets. Sophie stood, irresolute, on the pavement, and someone bumped into her from behind.

She thought it was Lucy, and turned around, opening her mouth to scold her. Instead, her jaw dropped even farther as she looked up—and up…he was at least six feet tall—at the man who had jostled her at the bar.

Oh, for Christ’s sake. “Watch where you’re going,” Sophie snapped, and took two nervous, skipping steps back. Leave me alone. Go away.

“Sorry.” He smiled, showing incredibly white teeth, but the expression was like a grimace. “You okay?”

She didn’t have to reply. A scream punched the night, a high feminine note cut sharply off the moment it reached full-throated terror, and Sophie almost leaped out of her skin.

I know that voice! She was already moving, her heart hammering and her heels clattering. The bouncer at the Paintbox’s door had his head up, staring down the street as if trying to figure out where the sound had come from.

“Lucy!” she yelled, and paused for the barest moment before plunging into the alley. “Lucy!”

The alley ended on a blank brick wall, and there was a crumpled pale shape moving weakly in the gloom. A hand closed around her naked upper arm, hot fingers like steel bands driving in. Whoever had Sophie’s arm yanked her back as another shape—slim, male, with a blotch of blackness down its white shirt—looked up from its crouch, eyes running with crimson hellfire and darkness smeared across its lips.

Sophie screamed as the hand on her arm pulled her farther back. Another slice of golden light opened up, and slim graceful bodies piled through, crouching and leaping. They swarmed the thing with the red-gleaming eyes, and Sophie’s legs turned to noodles. She sagged, the hand on her arm the only thing keeping her upright, and when the iron fingers loosened she actually fell, the shock of her knees meeting filthy concrete jarring up through her hips and shoulders.

The pale, weakly moving shape on the ground wore Lucy’s face, and it was gasping, rattling breaths drawn in. Its throat bubbled and gaped, and as Sophie stared, it stopped moving—and the thing in the white shirt, snarling, turned away from the back of the alley and lunged for her.

It shouldn’t have happened.

They’d hunted upir before, of course, while the old alpha was alive. But the farm had burned, their sleeping shaman and alpha dead in the flames, and now they were on their own, scrabbling to survive. They had cut both Tribe and upir a wide berth since.

And Zach shouldn’t have followed her, but she smelled too good to be true. Brunette, yes. Human, which was all right but not exactly appetizing. But young, female, warm—and with an edge of moonlight and snow, something cold and crystalline. Zach hadn’t smelled that in forever, and certainly not with the tantalizing musk of something that belonged to him overlaying it.

He’d leaned close and gotten a good lungful, and she was probably what he thought she was, which made it incredibly lucky, and incredibly—

But she’d flinched away as if she knew what he was, and searched the inside of the nightclub as if she’d lost her purse. She hadn’t; he’d kept his fingers well away from it, despite fleecing at least four people at the bar while he watched her. Pale skin and pale eyes. Nice hips, a glory of curling sandalwood hair, a pair of cute little steel-rimmed librarian glasses, and that ridiculous purse she kept clutching. She’d walked right out the front door while he was still cutting across the dance floor, harvesting another few wallets and emptying them by touch. It was almost too easy when you had the training and quicker-than-human reflexes. The rest of them had been working the crowd, Julia concentrating on businessmen and Brun sliding through knots of college boys with fat rolls to spend on killing their livers. Those fat rolls would keep the Family fed and moving.