Larissa Ione - Passion Unleashed

Eidolon ran his hand through his short, dark hair. “Yeah, well, he hired the assassin to handle his revenge on us in the event of his death. You must have injured him, because he was in bad shape. Tayla tracked and caught him while Shade was bringing you back here. He confessed everything before Luc ate him.”

“Ate him?”

E nodded. “The assassin was a leopard-shifter. Nothing scares them more than werewolves, so we chained him up in Luc’s basement to get him to talk. We thought we’d secured him far enough away from Luc.” He shrugged. “Apparently not.”

“I love werewolves,” Wraith said, shooting Shade a sly grin. “Guess you’d better not piss off Runa. She might eat you.” Shade had bonded to a werewolf last year, and had been disgustingly happy since. “Why are you here, anyway? Shouldn’t you be helping her with the monsters?”

“You mean the ones you haven’t bothered to come see yet?”

“Shade.” Eidolon’s voice held a soft warning, which was odd. Usually Shade was the voice of reason when it came to handling Wraith.

But ever since Runa had delivered their triplets, Shade had been seriously overprotective and easily offended. He just didn’t get that not everyone went as goo-goo over his offspring as he did.

Wraith shoved the sheet off his body and saw that he was naked. Not that he cared, but his coat had better not have been ruined when they stripped him. Knowing Shade’s love of trauma shears, Wraith figured odds were good that he’d have to buy another one.

“So why all the doom and gloom? The assassin failed.”

Shade and E exchanged glances, which set Wraith on high alert. This wasn’t good.

“No, he didn’t fail,” Shade said softly. “The guy has a partner. He’s still out there, and he’s after all of us.”

“So I hunt his ass down and kill him. I don’t see the problem.”

Shade’s pause made Wraith’s gut do a slow slide to his feet. “The problem is that the first assassin shot you with a slow-acting poison dart.”

Wraith snorted. “Is that all? Just shoot me up with the antidote.”

“Remember Roag’s foray into the storeroom?” E asked, and yeah, Wraith remembered. Last year during Roag’s bid for revenge, he’d helped himself to E’s collection of rare artifacts and crap Wraith gathered for him. “One of the things he took was the mordlair necrotoxin. That’s what the assassin used.” E exhaled slowly. “There’s no antidote.”

No antidote? “Then a spell. Find a spell to cure it.” Panic started to fray the edges of his control, and Shade must have sensed it, because his grip grew firmer.

“Wraith, we’ve consulted every text, every shaman, every witch.… There’s nothing that can flush the poison from your system.”

“So, bottom line. What are you saying?”

E handed Wraith a mirror. “Take a look at your neck.” He brushed Wraith’s hair back to reveal his personal symbol at the top of his dermoire. The hourglass, which had always appeared full on the bottom, had emerged following his first maturation cycle at the age of twenty.

Wraith inhaled sharply at what he saw now: The hourglass had been inverted, the sand flowing from top to bottom, marking time.

“You’re dying,” Eidolon said. “You have a month, maybe six weeks, to live.”

Serena Kelley was dying. Well, not literally, but it felt like it, what with the way the air was being sucked from her lungs by an extremely hot vampire who was kissing her senseless.

She wasn’t one to hang out in Goth clubs, but tonight’s nosebleed-Euro-Goth music at Alchemy had promised to bring in the vampires—both the wannabe’s of the human variety and the actual undead.

The music echoed off the walls of the old slaughterhouse so loudly it messed with her heart’s ability to beat, shocking her pulse into an uneven, chaotic rhythm. The smell of perfume, sweat, and sex was thick in the air, ratcheting up her libido. She moved with the crush of bodies on the dance floor, going with the tide as the vampire whose name she’d just learned guided her.

She sensed his hunger, his dark need, and yes, it was wrong of her to lead him on like this. Wrong to let him think he was going to get a meal and a notch in his coffin from her.

But what the hell. Every girl needed to flirt now and then.

Especially when flirting was as far as she could go with a guy.

“Come,” Marcus said, in that low whisper vampires could somehow make audible above any racket. “My table waits.”

Marcus was an old vamp, his formal, stiff speech part of his allure, and Serena’s hormones ran amok as he led her to a shadowed corner where several human groupies quivered like excited lapdogs at his approach.

Like so many older-generation vamps, he dressed in tasteful, conservative clothing beneath a midnight trench coat that helped him blend among the Goth and punk fashion in the bars. Glossy black, waist-length hair and ruby-red lips on a severe, pale face completed the look.

He waved his hand, and the lapdogs scattered, some of them cutting her jealous glares. She wondered how many knew he was a real vampire. Few who were deep into the vampire lifestyle actually believed in the undead. Those who did had a tendency to become Renfields—scraping, bowing hangers-ons who offered themselves up to be used in any way a vampire wanted.

Serena might have a thing for vamps, but she’d never stepped over the line to become a meal or a throwaway bedmate.

They sank into the booth, her black cargoes sliding across the faux-leather seats. Marcus wrapped his arm around her waist and tugged her into him.

Perfect. Because yes, she had a vampire fetish her boss, benefactor, and personal Aegis Guardian, Valeriu Macek, would have seizures over, and yes, she liked to live on the wild side. But she also liked to mix business with pleasure, and at this very moment, her business as a treasure hunter involved stealing Marcus’s very valuable, very antique bracelet off his wrist.

Slowly, carefully, she slid her hand over his so her fingers rested on the ancient Macedonian bauble. Marcus didn’t notice—his heavy-lidded gaze focused on her throat, and his erection prodded her hip.

“Shall we go outside, or stay here?” he asked, and she wondered if he knew she was fully aware of what he was.

The way he kept his fangs concealed told her he probably didn’t know. Then again, after hundreds of years of being undead, keeping them hidden had probably become second nature to him. And really, vampire canines weren’t all that obvious unless the vampire became excited, and then they’d erupt from the gums, elongating, growing… so erotic.

Serena tilted her jaw, exposing her throat enticingly. Distractingly. “Here,” she purred, working the bracelet with one hand, and running the other up his chest.

Powerful muscles flexed beneath her palm, and for the thousandth time, she wished she weren’t celibate. Wished she could let herself do all the stupid, risky things humans did when they were in their twenties.

Marcus’s smile revealed just the tips of his fangs as he leaned in, wincing when his chest crushed her pendant between them. He frowned at the grape-sized crystal. “That’s one hell of a jewel.”

“Gift from my mom,” she said easily, even though the necklace was far more than that.

The bracelet slid free. She slipped it inside a leg pocket in her pants and glanced at her watch. “Oh, would you look at the time! I’d better go. Don’t want to turn into a pumpkin.”

Marcus’s hand squeezed her biceps. “I am not finished with you.”

She smiled sweetly. “Oh, but you are. I’m no swan,” she said, using the term for humans who offered up their blood or psychic energy to vampires, though they usually believed the vampires were of the breathing, human variety—what true undead jokingly called fakires.