"I don't trust him," Vixen said. She was walking through the warehouse at Seth's insistence. He had hold of her hand, guiding her to where they were going to sleep for the day, though he hadn't told her yet where that was.
"Gregor or Reaper?"
"Gregor." She tilted her head. "Reaper...is dangerous. But he wouldn't betray us. Not deliberately, at least."
"I'm not even sure what that means."
She shrugged. "It could be dangerous tonight. The exchange."
"It's in a public place. That will help."
"No, Seth." She stopped walking and turned to look straight into his eyes. "It makes no difference whatsoever to Gregor. He doesn't care if innocents die, or if his bloodlust is witnessed by mortals. He never has. But Reaper does. Don't you see that doing this in public puts Reaper more at risk, not less? He'll be at a disadvantage from the start, because he'll care about protecting the innocents."
Seth shook his head. "I hadn't thought of that."
"Something is wrong-I feel danger right to the core of me."
"All right. We'll talk to Reaper."
She nodded, started to pull her hand free.
He held tighter. "At sundown, when we rise. There will be time enough then." And he started walking again, tugging her along at his side.
"Where are we going?"
"There," he said. He pointed to the van, which had been parked inside, to keep it from view. It was in a small section of the warehouse, separated from the area where the others had taken up residence. The car was parked beside it. "Roxy said we could sleep in the van, if we wanted."
"Oh."
"You're disappointed?"
One shoulder rose, a half shrug that came automatically. "I used to curl up beside a fallen tree, or beneath a pine, snuggled and warm with the stars overhead. But now I can only sleep by day, and it has to be indoors." Her eyes closed slowly. "I miss...my old life."
"I'm sorry."
"It can never be the same. But I can get some of it back. As soon as this is over, and Gregor is stopped and Topaz is safe, and I know that you'll be safe, too, then..." She let her words trail off as she searched her mind.
"Then..." he asked.
Vixen smiled. "I don't know, exactly. I only know I'll be free again. To do what I want, run wild, and play and explore. I won't be able to sleep in the sunlight, but maybe I can get some of my old life back again. Somehow."
He looked sad then. She tipped her head to one side, then the other, studying his face. "Why does that make you feel badly?"
"I guess because...you didn't mention me as being a part of those plans of yours."
"Don't be silly, Seth. I can't make your plans for you. Only my own, for me."
They'd reached the back of the van, and she opened the doors. Then she paused to look. Seth had folded up the rear seats, leaving plenty of room for a bed on the floor. There were blankets and pillows spread out, ready and welcoming. She climbed inside and stretched out among the softness. "This is almost as good as being under the stars."
"Is it?"
His earlier mood had been upbeat, even excited. Now he seemed brooding. It wasn't like him.
Laughing, she reached for him, and pulled him so hard that he fell into the nest of blankets with her, landing on top of her. His groin was nestled between her thighs, and his face was close to hers. She felt him growing hard against her, and smiled even more. "Oh, I see how it is. That's what you have in mind, is it?"
"What?" he asked, feigning innocence.
"Sex. Mating."
"Not exactly."
She frowned, disappointment dousing her excited anticipation away. "No? What, then?"
"Lovemaking," he said.
Her smile returned. "But isn't that the same thing?"
"Not by a long shot, Vixen. Tonight I'm going to teach you the difference."
She lifted her eyebrows, and her smile widened. "You mean, we get to do both?"
The look of sadness fled from his face. He smiled, slowly but deeply; it reached his eyes and, she thought, his soul. "Yeah," he said, "we'll do both." Then he slid his hands around the nape of her neck and kissed her. But it was a light, teasing kiss. His lips danced over hers, first upper, then lower, and they almost tickled, their touch was so featherlight.
She parted her own lips, longing for the heat and passion of his earlier kisses. Mouths open, tongues questing, suckling and biting as their bodies strained to press closer, even when they were touching at every possible juncture.
But he didn't give her that. Instead, he kissed slowly, tenderly. His fingers drifted back and forth over her nape, the touch exquisitely gentle and yet incredibly arousing. God, he was killing her.
His kisses moved to her jaw and down to her neck, where he nibbled and sucked, but softly. So softly.
She felt an arousal the likes of which she had never felt before. The bloodlust rose inside her, creating a red haze over her vision. His mouth near her throat was an image, a sensation, that drove her wild. She wanted him to bite down, to drink from her. She wanted to push him down and spring on him and drain him. She wanted him inside her. She wanted all of him.
And yet he held himself above her, not even letting his body's weight rest on her, just gently nibbling, his entire demeanor one of infinite control. Except, perhaps, for the hardness between his legs. He arched his hips against hers in a slow, primal rhythm that spoke of mating.
She was trembling now. She was panting.
"We have more than an hour," he whispered.
"If you make me wait that long, I swear on the undead, Seth, I will rip out your heart."
His eyes, lazily half-lidded before, widened a little at that declaration.
"Please?" she whimpered. "Seth, could we do the mating first, fast and urgently, the way it's meant to be, and save this slow lovemaking for after? If I don't achieve release soon, I think I'll surely die of need."
He smiled then, his features relaxing. "I'm a little eager myself, to be honest."
"Then take me, Seth. Take me now. Make it hard and fast and deep. Please."
The smile died, and his eyes became darker. Passion-glazed, she thought. He looked different. Intense and deep. He reached down to peel his shirt up and over his head as she watched.
His chest was magnificent. She'd noticed as much before, and she noticed it all over again now, with an even deeper appreciation this time, though it hadn't changed. Maybe she had, though. She'd become more and more fond of him, and that might make him appear even more physically attractive to her. Had his abs been that taut before? Had his chest been that smooth and firm? Had his biceps really been that hard? Had his shoulders...
Suddenly her hands were on him, running over every spot she had admired and every place in between. Touching him, feeling his skin and muscle slipping beneath her palm, had suddenly become as necessary as breathing. She couldn't help herself.
He'd been undoing his jeans, but he stopped when she began caressing him. He went still, watching her, and then his eyes fell closed as she stroked and rubbed his shoulders and his chest, his arms and his belly.
"You're killing me, Vixen."
"As you were me, a few moments ago. It serves you right." But she stopped running her palms over him and instead peeled off her own blouse. Then she quickly shimmied out of her skirt and panties, and leaned back to observe him.
He was kneeling in front of her but had only managed to unsnap his jeans before he'd apparently lost the ability to do anything but stare at her. She blinked up at him. "What?"
"You."
"What about me?" She looked down at her body. "Is something wrong?"
"Nothing's wrong." He reached out, touched her arm, traced his hand down it. "You're beautiful, that's all. The most beautiful woman I've ever...God."
"That's very nice, Seth. But you're doing it wrong." She clasped his hand, removing it from her arm and placing it squarely on her left breast.
"Impatient little minx, aren't you?"
"I'm not a minx at all, though I've known a few, and you're right, they're terribly impatient."
He laughed, adjusting his hand, then using it to knead and squeeze her flesh. Then he brought his fingers together to press her nipple between them. She closed her eyes and breathed through smiling lips. "Yes, yes. That's better."
And then his lips were on hers again, but no longer with those useless, teasing kisses he'd been giving her before. Now he kissed her the way she'd been wanting him to: fully, deeply, almost desperately. It made her body heat, made the trembling he'd already elicited come on more strongly. Full-body shudders racked her now. And she loved it. She loved it all.
She twined her fingers into his hair and tugged his head away from her mouth, guiding it toward her breast, until he latched on and took her nipple with his lips, his tongue, even his teeth, which made her scream with pleasure.
She wrestled with his jeans, shoving them down his hips; then she lifted her legs and wrapped them around his waist, locked her ankles behind him and used them to pull him down, until his hard, erect member slid right inside her. Deeply inside her.
She closed her eyes, and her mouth formed a perfect O, which was also the sound that emerged. It was a cry of sheer sensation, of physical bliss.
He moved then, sliding back and forth, in and out, but not only that. Sometimes he moved his hips in circles, rocking so deeply into her that she went into an instant orgasm.
His hands slid beneath her, gripping her hips tight and holding her to him so he could penetrate even more deeply as she climaxed. She moaned and cried, then came again as her body tried to shake itself apart. And all the while he held her, pushing her more and more, making the pleasure go on and on.
Finally he eased back just a little, changing his movements to slower, gentler ones, just to give her time, she thought, to come back to earth again.
Panting, she managed to stammer one word. "Ah-ma-zing."
"We're just getting started. Come here."
He wrapped her in his arms, hooked a leg around and beneath hers, and rolled them both over, until she was lying on top of him.
She liked that very much. Her knees were down, her body upright, her thighs straddling him. She rode him that way, hard and deep, fast, and she enjoyed knowing that he was getting incredible pleasure from watching the way her breasts bounced as she worked him. She could tell. After a while he used his hands to torment her nipples, pinching and pulling while she drove herself into a frenzy on top of him.
It wasn't enough, so she began to lean back, just to see how far she could go, changing the angle of entry and slide, the contact points, just enough. New nerve endings came to screaming life, and with a few more strokes she was coming again, screaming his name, shivering all over, bouncing faster than before, and then losing herself in a torrent of spasms that rocked her right to the core.
She didn't realize at first that he had climaxed, as well. She only figured that out when he didn't start moving in and out again. He held her close, kissed her mouth, her neck, stared into her eyes in between.
And there was something...Something way beyond the intense sex they'd just had and the momentous orgasms he had given her-the likes of which she'd never known. There was something else, twisting in her gut. It was big, and not entirely pleasant. It felt like a stirring of panic, of utter, heart-rending fear. It felt like the fight-or-flight response she'd heard spoken of, taking hold. It was hard to breathe, because for some reason her throat was constricting painfully, and her eyes were burning, as if someone had dumped them full of acid.
"What did you do?" she asked.
"What do you mean?" He stroked her hair, unable to see her face, because she was resting it on his chest just then. "Are you all right, Vixen?"
"I feel...Something's wrong."
He sat up a little, lifting her from his chest and searching her face. "What is it?"
"Is it-is it possible for a vampire to have a heart attack?"
"I don't think so."
"Well, that's what it feels like. It hurts. Right here." She pressed a balled-up fist to her chest. "I think you made me climax so powerfully I damaged my heart."
He grinned, but when she didn't respond in kind, he wiped the look from his face and studied her seriously instead. "I promise, there's nothing wrong with your heart. Maybe it's just starting to feel something for the first time, hmm? Could that be it?"
"Feel something? Of course it felt something. That was incredible. Every single part of my body felt something. But it shouldn't hurt."
"I meant emotional feelings, not physical ones," he said.
"Don't be stupid, Seth. Sex is physical. Not emotional." And yet his suggestion rang true, somehow. It wasn't just the sensations that had coursed through her. It was him. It was something very specifically about him.
He'd flinched when she spoke, almost as if he were the one with the inexplicable pain pulsing through his chest. She soothed him with a pat on the shoulder, then sat up straighter. "I need to be alone for a while, before the day sleep."
"Oh." He looked so incredibly sad when he said that. As if she were hurting him, somehow.
"I'll come back. I need...I can't explain what I need, but believe me, it will help. And I will come back. I'd like...I'd like to sleep in your arms, I think."
His brows rose, the sadness in his eyes replaced by a thin look of hope and a dense one of confusion. "Oh. Okay."
"Okay. I won't be long." She climbed, naked, out of the van.
"Your clothes," he began, but she only tossed a smile over her shoulder and called, "Don't need them," as she raced out of the empty warehouse and into the night.
Seth followed her. He couldn't help himself; he had to know, dammit. She'd been keeping a secret. He knew that much. And he had a feeling it was something that was having a huge impact on their relationship-on the way she felt things-or, more accurately, didn't feel them. Hell, how could she not feel something after the sex they'd just had?
How could she even claim to feel nothing, when she looked at him the way she did? When she touched him as if she adored every inch of him, as if she couldn't keep from running her hands over his skin even if she wanted to? When she took his body into hers the way she did? How the hell could she not realize that what had been happening between them went way beyond sex?
How?
He crept out of the warehouse just in time to see her running and leaping, stark naked, through the tall grasses and wildflowers and weeds of a vacant lot-turned-field, until she seemed to stumble, seemed to bend, seemed to fall down into the grass.
Almost as if she really were having some kind of heart attack. Hell, it wasn't possible. Was it?
He ran into the field, because he couldn't see her anymore. Her body was hidden by the deep grasses. He ran through the night, his preternatural vision probing, until he found her, about ten feet ahead of him, lying on the ground, writhing and flattening the grass all around her.
He lifted a hand, opened his mouth to call her name, to ask what was wrong, then froze when he realized what he was seeing.
She was changing. Vixen's very shape was changing. Her body curled in on itself, and she buried her face beneath the thick mass of red hair, and then she seemed to shrink, and shrink, and...change. Skin vanished beneath sleek shiny fur. The hair covering her face became a long, lush tail. And when it flicked away, the face of a fox-a vixen-peered up at him. Big brown eyes, exotically slanted, blinked once, and then she sprang onto all fours and darted away through the grass.
Seth just stood there, staring after her. "What the hell just happened?"
A hand closed on his shoulder. "So now you know," Roxy said.
He turned. "That's her secret? That she's not really a woman but an animal?"
"She's not an animal, Seth, she's a shape-shifter. Or was. Now she's a vampire, just like you."
"Not just like me."
"Of course she is."
"Bullshit." He shrugged her hand off his shoulder and stomped back toward the warehouse. A shiver worked up his spine. "Shit," he muttered. "I just fucked a goddamned animal."
