HelaineEvan’s fingers curled against that sweet spot inside of me again, and tears rolled down my cheeks as I tried so hard not to come undone.“That’s a good girl,” he purred as he withdrew his fingers, bringing them to his lips with a hum of approval before that sinful tongue of his lapped up my juices. “There, it’s just up ahead.”My eyes watered as I squirmed in my seat, left frustrated by the ruined orgasm.But I knew Evan. Whatever he had in store for us would more than make up for it.“What is?” I asked, squinting to try and get a better look at the unassuming building on the side of the road, nothing around it for miles. “A motel?”“The Rose Garden,” he explained, and sure enough when we pulled into the parking lot, an old neon rose glowed above the entryway. “This place has catered to kink since it opened back in the seventies. It’s where I had some of my first real experiences with BDSM, back when I was . . . ”Back when he was alive.“Do we have time?” I looked up at the m
Helaine“How does it feel?” He took me by the hand, inviting me to stand on trembling legs, still wobbly from my orgasm.“It’s . . . ” I struggled to put it into words. Even with the intense burst of pleasure dissipating, the plug in my ass kept my body on edge, desperate for more. “It’s almost like I could come again if you touch me at all.”He must’ve liked that, because his lips curled into a cat-like grin as he backed me against the bed, sliding his hand up my thigh before cupping my sex. “We’ll have to get you one for home . . . maybe one that vibrates.”My bottom lip disappeared between my teeth and I squirmed against his body. Just the idea of having that much stimulation on top of our usual sessions was almost enough to undo me all over again.“Evan,” I whimpered, bucking my hips against his hand like a bitch in heat. Mercifully, he slipped two fingers into my dripping cunt, situating his thumb against my clit as he slowly pushed me toward that edge.“I’ve never liked my name
EvanHelaine was still asleep when I awoke, our limbs woven together on the comfortable bed. It had been a long time since I’d slept without the walls of my coffin to protect me, and sleeping in the open like this unnerved me.It had been a too long since I worried about slayers—Cardinal and Main was such a crime ridden street that a careful vampire could go entirely undetected. I had for decades.But being out on the open road again was a risk. I knew that when I suggested it, but there wasn’t much choice.Helaine’s father was the only person who might be able to shed some light on her true origins, and there was no way in hell she’d be able to let it go until she got some answers.I couldn’t let her keep on suffering like that.Unwinding myself from the warmth of her embrace, I sat up to stretch. The corner of my lip tugged into a smirk when she groaned in her sleep, inching her body closer to where mine had been.She was so filled with life that I couldn’t help but admire her.Anti
EvanThe look of pure concern in her eyes stabbed into me like a knife to the chest. The wound closed as I dragged my thumb across my hand, but she had already seen.The damage had been done.“I never meant for you to see me like this.” I gazed at her with pleading eyes, quietly begging her to understand.Before now, she’d seen me as a domineering presence—always careful, and always in control, but by the very nature of the vampiric curse, there was an inherent weakness.One that made me look and feel truly pathetic.“What—what’s happening?” She asked with a furrowed brow as she extended a gentle hand to touch me, only for me to flinch away. “Evan?”“I should have known this would happen, sleeping away from my coffin.” Shaking my head, I moved as far away from her as I could in the bath, water sloshing around us. “But I haven’t needed nearly as much blood since I met you, so I thought I’d manage until you recovered enough.”“Your coffin? What does that have to do with—”“Sleeping in a
HelaineThe man let out a gurgle as I pulled the rope more tightly around his neck, and I didn’t let go until his body fell completely limp. His face hit the floor hard with a terrible thwack as his nose broke against the ground.My breathing was labored as I stood over him, amidst the carnage. I almost couldn’t believe what I was seeing, what I’d just done.But he would have killed Evan if he had the chance, and I couldn’t let that happen. He was the only one I had who could ever understand what I was going through, and I . . . I cared for him.Deeply.My hands trembled and my head ached as the world seemed to spin around me.I killed a man today. I took a life. A soul.“Helaine, you should’ve stayed in the room,” Evan scolded me, but I could see the gratitude in his eyes as he approached, holding me in his arms. “They wouldn’t have even hesitated to kill you.”“Which is why we killed them,” I retorted, clinging to Evan as I stared down at the still-warm corpse of the man I strangled
Helaine“I’ll handle it,” he whispered in my ear, as he slid out of me, stuffing his still-hard cock back into his jeans. “Let me do the talking.”My stomach felt like it had tied itself in knots, remembering the last time those words came out of his mouth.Of course, that wasn’t fair of me.He was in a vulnerable place that night. He’d just been shown evidence that after all these years of nothingness and hunger, he was getting his soul back. I couldn’t begrudge his need for answers.Not when we were currently sticking our necks out to hunt down my dad for any information he had about me.Evan could never have imagined that summoning Lilith would have caused the trouble it did. As far as Evan knew before I took that photo of him, I was perfectly human.And it wasn’t as though living in ignorance would have changed the terrible truth that I was literal the spawn of satan.At least I found out while there still might be time to do something about it.The way he strode toward the absolu
EvanHelaine clung to me with tears streaming down her face and I was suddenly very aware of the blood drying on my hand as I smoothed down her hair.We were a mess, inside and out.No one took their first kill well. Taking another human life wasn’t supposed to be easy, but there were more layers of it for her.Through that one brutal action, it was like the darkness in her was roused from sleep. I saw it in her eyes, and there was no way I could pretend that I didn’t.“It’s going to be alright,” I murmured into her hair, but the words felt hollow even as I said them.How could I even begin to define “alright” for her right now?Whatever happened, whatever path she chose, I knew that I’d follow her. I’d take a thousand lives if it meant getting to twine mine with hers. It wasn’t as though spilling blood was new to me.Lilith called me Helaine’s champion, and she wasn’t wrong.But that wasn’t what Helaine needed to hear right now and as she clung to me, trembling as sobs wracking her s
HelaineEvan’s eyes lingered on me as I pulled his old shirt over my head. The material was thicker than I was used to, but that made sense considering it was a man’s shirt from the eighties, not the flimsy tissue that passed for fabric nowadays.The jeans were a little tight on my hips, but at least they were clean and dry, instead of spattered with someone else’s blood.But . . . there was more than just old clothes in the back of the el camino, and I had the distinct impression that he didn’t want to look at it when he had me pick our clothes.I wasn’t the only one with a past, and that was never a secret. But the more my mind lingered on what I saw in the truck-bed the more I wondered exactly what happened, and why he didn’t want to talk about it.“You look good in my clothes.” He hooked a finger through one of the belt loops on my borrowed jeans and used it to pull me close so he could press a kiss to my freshly washed hair. “I’ll have to let you raid my closet when we get back t
HelaineThe world felt different, up in the sky.Over the past few days I’d been doing what Valek said—training. I learned to use the wings that erupted from my back, learned to feel them and control them just the same as my arms and legs.But it wasn’t enough.How could it be?“You’re getting better at that,” Valek called from the ground, her cold black eyes following me as my wings beat the air. “It’s an amazing freedom, isn’t it?”“I did what you said.” My lips curved into a grimace as I landed in front of her. Logically, I knew I should still be afraid of her, but the more time I was forced to spend with this ancient monster the harder it was not to see her as a person. “I connected with my wings, but I still can’t hide them.”She let out a laugh, her eyes falling shut as she shook her head. “Your wings, yes. But you’re still fighting where they came from.” Her fingertips hovered over my heart as she leaned in, too close, but I was quickly learning that social boundaries weren’t s
EvanOne more fucking night of not finding Helaine.Snarling, I threw open the el camino’s bed cover, squinting under the light of the full moon. It was the closest I could get to the sun without burning to a crisp, and it was still a little too bright for my sensitive eyes.But it was just one more reason to be pissed off tonight.When I looked around, I could see that we were on a very rural stretch of the highway, moving west according to the rusty old road signs. There wasn’t another car around for miles as far as I could hear. Not even the kind of old truck I’d expect to hear out in these parts.Helaine wasn’t here either.My boots crunched against the abandoned gas station parking lot’s gravel as I stalked toward the driver’s side door, I slammed my hand down on the hood in a fit of frustration as Frank stepped out of my ride, lighting up a cigarette.I snatched it from his fingers, taking a long drag, hoping it would do something to take off the edge . . . but it didn’t. One of
HelaineSitting naked on the wooden chair felt awkward, and I wrapped my wings around my body as I shivered in the air’s chill.Valek had no such issue, confidently striding naked through the room to stir the cauldron that emanated a delicious aroma that reminded me just how hungry I was. I couldn’t help feeling exposed, but there was something about the way that Valek wore her own skin that gave away just how ancient she was.Unbound by societal convention for the simple fact that she predated it. By a long shot.Her body was gorgeous, as though she was a work of art carved from pure snow, but I didn’t get the feeling that she was in any way trying to seduce me. Being naked was just natural to her—the leather scraps she wore as clothes before hastily thrown together almost as an afterthought.It probably helped that she was an undead creature, and most likely didn’t feel the chill in the air.The whole atmosphere held an eerie air of domesticity as she ladled stew into a wooden bowl
EvanThe moon was beginning to descend, and that meant that soon the sun would rise. Too soon for my liking as I followed Frank through the cemetery.“The Knights really had a cache here?” My brow arched in doubt, but he didn’t so much as look back as he blazed on ahead. “In a public cemetery?”“A mausoleum,” he specified. “Knights coming and going would’ve just seemed like family members of the departed, and no one but those with authorization would have access. Seemed pretty perfect at the time.”He gestured ahead, and sure enough there was an old mausoleum, overgrown with vines and half covered in moss.“So why do you think they abandoned it, if it was so perfect?” I watched him warily as he pulled a key from the chain around his neck and used it to unlock the tomb.It seemed . . . convenient, and I had to wonder if it was really abandoned, or if the Knights of Testament had their suspicions that Frank was hiding nearby, and they hoped they could draw him out.They had apparently t
HelaineA groan of protest left my body before my eyes deigned to flutter open. My head was pounding, and my mouth felt impossibly dry.A black spider with spindly legs skittered across my field of vision, but I was too exhausted to scramble away from it like I might’ve otherwise done if I were coherent enough to be afraid.My body felt unreasonably heavy when I tried to adjust myself into a sitting position, and it became clear exactly why when I looked over my shoulder to see the whitish feathers, sticky and flecked red, matted together with dried blood.Choking out a ragged sigh, I rolled my head back as I tried to rub the pain out of my aching throat. If the wings were real, then everything that happened to me last night was real.And Evan . . . well, I had no idea where he was, which meant that he probably had no idea where I was.Hell, I didn’t even know where I was.Getting to my feet was a struggle with the added weight of the extra limbs now protruding from my back, but it wa
Evan“I’m coming Helaine,” I whispered as I made my way down the porch steps. “I promise I’ll find you.”It was a promise I intended to keep. Valek didn’t strike me as one to keep a low profile—there’d probably be a trail of corpses once I got close enough to whatever den of horrors she was calling home these days.Only . . . I didn’t have a clue where to start looking, and there wasn’t time for me to go chasing my tail without any direction trying to find her.Whatever was happening to Helaine after she used her powers, it was obviously some kind of transformation. I didn’t know what I was going to find when I did finally catch up with her.But she was out there somewhere. I could feel it in what remained of my soul that she was still alive, but with her in Valek’s custody it was impossible to say for certain what to expect.What I didn’t expect was for Frank’s door to open behind me, creaking in protest when he followed me outside. “Kid,” he called after me, a desperate edge to his
HelaineWind whipped my face as Valek flew through the air, but I could hardly feel it.I hardly even remembered being taken from my childhood home. Everything after my body had erupted with that dark blast of energy felt unreal, like everything around me melted away in the inferno of the pain that racked my body.But in whatever conscious part of my mind that still struggled to hold on, I knew that Evan was still at my father’s house, left so far behind that there was no way he’d ever find me.What would he do? What would Frank do?Valek had frozen Evan and cast him off as easily as if she were flicking away an ant that had crawled onto her deathly pale skin. The only thin assurance I had that he was even alive was that in some strange way, I could feel him.Maybe it was like Lilith said—his damned soul was bound to me. I would feel it if he’d been killed.I hoped.There was precious little I could feel in this moment other than the searing torture my body was enduring.But he had to
Evan“Helaine . . . ” I could hardly hear my own voice in this moment, like my head was in a fish bowl, and my mouth had gone impossibly dry. I pawed weakly at Helaine, trying to pull her toward the door. “We need to leave. Now.”My whole body felt like there was ice in my veins when I saw her—Valek, the Mistress of Blood, with her cold, black eyes fixed squarely on the woman I loved.“Helaine,” I urged.She yanked her arm out of my grip, looking back at me with desperate eyes, still clouded with inky black tears as she protested, “I can’t let her kill my dad!”“He tried to kill you!” I pleaded, reaching for her again, but it was useless.Evan after all he’d put her through, Helaine still saw the man as her father. She was like a scared little girl right now, and I couldn’t blame her.She wasn’t the only one who felt small—helpless.It was impossible not to feel that way when an ancient horror beyond mortal comprehension made herself known.Frank Fairgrieve made a pathetic effort to p
HelaineFrank’s brow furrowed as he openly stared at me, the shotgun clattering to the gravel below as it fell from his hand. No doubt, I was the last person he expected to see rolling up to his house tonight.“Helaine . . . ” His voice was barely above a whisper as his head shook slowly, side to side, like he knew this wasn’t just a social call.Like he knew all his lies would catch up to him eventually.Evan followed, climbing out of the driver’s seat and eyeing my father dangerously over the el camino’s hood.“Who’s he?” Dad asked, his eyes narrowed suspiciously as he gestured toward Evan.“Never mind who I am,” Evan spat without an ounce of hesitation, his eyes never leaving my dad as though if he stared hard enough his gaze would pierce through him. “Your business is with her, not me.”In some cases, I supposed that Evan’s gaze could do just that to a person’s mind, but he wasn’t using his ability now. He wouldn’t meddle like that when he knew how badly I needed this.“I think yo