Beautiful Danger

A kiss could be used to manipulate—by both of them. But she sensed no untoward intentions from Domingos. And that worried her. Because she liked a challenge. She needed that challenge to feel pride for a job well done. If the vamp was just going to stand back and let her at him with stake at the ready, what was the thrill in that?

As well, it mattered little whether she liked him or despised the very marrow in his breed’s bones; if the vampire wouldn’t stop kissing her she’d never be able to stake him. Never would she be able to move on to number seventy-three, and seventy-four, and so on. She’d be stuck, paused.

Because a kiss…? Well. Such intimacy. Their bodies needn’t even touch, only their mouths, breathing, tasting, granting permission. And in such a startling manner. She honestly did not know how to deal with it.

Lark closed the door and leaned against it. “What do I do now?”

Rook would slap her soundly and tell her to get a grip. If Todd were still alive he would—

“No,” she whispered. “He’s gone. When can I finally bury him so that my heart can move on?”

Only after she’d achieved her goal. A goal that had suddenly stalled at number seventy-two.

Chapter 6

Lark snapped upright on the sofa. The digital alarm on her cell phone played the opening notes to the Brandenburg concerto. Earlier in the evening she’d set it to go off at midnight, knowing she was tired and would probably doze after she’d showered and ordered in Greek.

With the stoic resignation she’d gained during her training, she turned off the alarm and padded into the bedroom. Behind a secret door in the closet she found full Order gear: Kevlar-lined leather trousers, Kevlar vest over a T-shirt, cleric’s coat and leather gloves. Inside the coat and around her belt she wore three titanium stakes, a syringe filled with holy water (worked on baptized vamps), a pistol with silver bullets (would kill a werewolf but only slow down a vampire) and numerous nonstandard-issue blades that she’d used more often than any of the other weapons.

She had no idea whether or not Domingos had been baptized. Didn’t matter. The physical fight was her strong point. Up close and in their face was the only way to bring vampires down. Rook often chided her for taking the risk of putting herself so close to the opponent, but she’d argued that staking required close contact anyway, so why stake them and make it easy when a fight served to ignite her need for vengeance?

The physical struggle actually soothed something deep in her soul. It was the only way she could do what she did. And if she began to question her motivations, then she’d be lost.

She pulled her straight black hair into a tight ponytail and fluffed her bangs. A little eyeliner and some lip gloss (just because she was on the hunt didn’t mean she had to look like a pale ghost), and then she stepped into the pair of running shoes she’d packed. The soles on these had better traction than the Doc Martens she normally wore. The boots were outfitted with hinged blades she utilized often during the fight, but tonight she wanted stealth.

Because she knew exactly where to look for Domingos LaRoque.

She locked the front door and strode down the outer walkway that hugged the building, and headed back inside to the main hallway. Smoothing away a strand of hair from her mouth, she touched her lips and experienced a flash of kissing the vampire, of feeling his seeking mouth against hers and of not at all reacting defensively to the hard slide of his fangs. He’d had to be careful not to cut her. At the moment she’d felt the fangs her blood had run cold, and yet the kiss had been too amazing for her to want him to stop.

As had been their first kiss up on the roof. After her initial horror, that is.

Lark sighed and shook her head miserably. It had been too long since she’d been kissed if she was thinking vampire kisses rocked. Either that or crazy was a communicable disease.

She tugged open the roof-access door and made her way up the rubber-padded concrete stairs, stealthily, a stake gripped at her side. She emerged in the warm summer night air. Moonlight sparkled on the tin eaves, but Lark didn’t admire the beauty. Instead she strode over to the man sitting on the mansard roof, leaning back on his elbows, bare toes jutting over the edge.

“Thought I’d find you here.”

“According to the last church bells I heard, it’s past midnight,” he said without looking up at her. “Time’s up.”

Now the moonlight would not allow her to ignore the beauty surrounding her—and that right in front of her. The vampire had cleaned up well. Lark had never been interested in men with long hair—or vampires, for that matter—and had always preferred clean-cut blonds. The fresh-from-the-beach-volleyball-game and I’mso-healthy-I-beam look appealed to her standards for health and fitness. Maybe it was Domingos’s straight nose, or the way the shadows played across his newly shaven jaw? Couldn’t be the fangs that peeked out between his lips. Nor could it be the pale, almost translucent skin that reminded her of pearls and fine things Lark had once liked to lay against her skin.

Something about him…

Then again, this one would never enjoy the sun on a sandy beach anytime soon.

“You’re making this too easy.” She stalked over to him, straddled his outstretched legs and crouched, slamming the flat base of the stake against his chest. The knights called their stake the death punch. She liked that term.

Lark peered into his unflinching gaze, not expecting him to return a defiant look, and he did not. “Say goodbye, vampire.”

“Goodbye, vampire.”

“I’m serious. I thought you wanted to live.”

“I do. I have over a dozen werewolves left to take out.”

“Then what if I promised not to stake you if you promise to leave the rest of pack Levallois alone?”

What was she saying?

“Can’t do that,” Domingos said. He eyed the stake. “I stand by my word, as I would expect you to stand by yours.”

Lark gritted her teeth, gripping the stake more firmly. All it required was one squeeze of her fingers about the paddles and the spring-loaded stake would eject out from the cylinder. The power of the release was so forceful it always bounced her fist upon the victim’s chest. It needed to be that strong to permeate fabric, flesh, bone and finally, the thick, sinewy heart muscle.

Once the vampire’s heart burst, it was dead. There was no coming back from a stake through the heart. She certainly didn’t believe the urban legend about the one vampire who had survived a stake by keeping it in and allowing it to slowly heal, thus pushing out the stake.

“Lark?”

Why she had given him her name was beyond her reason. Too intimate, that. Almost as intimate as a kiss.

Domingos’s eyes were soft, glittering with the gorgeous moonlight that managed to clear a way through the leftover rain clouds. Feeling her neck and throat flush hotly from his insistent regard, Lark strained to move her fingers. To squeeze the paddles. To finish him right here and now.

If only he wouldn’t look at her like that, with just the hint of a curve to his mouth to reveal fang and a decidedly wry smirk. Only one other man had possessed such a devastating smirk. It had been enough to cloud her eyes from his dangerous profession and fall blindly into his charms. To give up her plans to become a professional musician touring with a symphony. To believe that they could do the family thing and make it work. To hope that they could simply exist for one another.

Never again would charm seduce her. Not to the same end she’d had to bring her husband. It hadn’t been right, she being forced to such a thing. And it was all because of creatures like Domingos.

“Ah!” She thrust herself away from the vampire and, turning, sat, clasping the stake to her chest. Todd’s charming smile was right there, so close she could touch it, feel it, remember the way it had made her heart go pitterpatter. Until his smile had been lost, stolen by torture.

She was right there now, in the middle of the kitchen, kneeling on the tiled floor next to Todd. He’d been left at the doorstep an hour earlier. The man she had worried over for a year and a day writhed in agony on the floor, his clothing in tatters upon his emaciated form. Wounds on his forehead, arms and legs angered Lark. He’d been lashed. Over and over.

But those weren’t the most troubling wounds. Two puncture marks on his neck told her what the pain would not allow him to put into words.

Until he did speak—and then it was to beg.

“He begged me to kill him,” she gasped out.

“Your husband?” Domingos guessed. He hadn’t moved, and looked out across the rooftops that featured jagged spines silhouetted against the sky. “Why would he beg for such a thing?”

“Because they’d bitten him,” she said tightly. “He was going to transform into a vampire. The blood hunger was too strong to fight. To become a creature who feeds upon human blood was the last thing he could bear. So he begged me for hours to stake him, to end his agony.”

Todd’s moans had wended through her veins, cringing into her bones, until she’d crouched against the wall and had covered her ears with her hands. She hadn’t been able to look at him, and so he’d crawled up to her and slapped the titanium stake into her hand.

“Did you?” Domingos asked softly. “Stake him?”

Lark bent her head against her knees and squeezed her arms about her legs, not willing to voice the obvious reply. Tears did not come, because she’d cried more than a lifetime’s worth over the year and a day that her husband had been in captivity. Yet her body shuddered, racked by the pain that could not manifest.

She didn’t deserve forgiveness. Rook and the Order certainly hadn’t given it to her. She didn’t need it, didn’t want it. She’d done what had to be done. The cruel act had become her cross to bear, and she understood that.

But that didn’t mean it didn’t torture her as much as she believed her husband had been tortured. All as a means to prove to the Order that they, the vampires, would not stand for the Order’s brand of vigilante justice.