Blood Submission (Deathless Night Series Book 5) Page 14

  Surprisingly, he obeyed, coming to an abrupt halt. Scowling down at her, he seemed to come to a decision. “No. I’ve told you enough. There’s nothing else you need to know.” Then he smiled, an evil slash of his beautiful lips that she was quickly learning did not bode well for her. “Get used to it down here in your hole, little mouse.” Spinning on his heel, he made to leave.

  Laney ran behind him. “Wait! Dante! Wait! Please!” She grabbed his arm and hung on. “Please,” she begged. “I’m thirsty.” His head whipped around, his eyes flaring with heat as they searched for and found hers. “I need water,” she clarified. “And food. And a shower. And clean clothes. And…I want to hold my cat! You can’t just leave me down here!”

  Those obsidian eyes, cold as the winter sky once more, travelled the length of her. “I’ll bring you something to eat when I get back.” Pulling his arm from her grasp, he leaned over her. “But get this through your pretty head now, little mouse. I don’t care about your comfort. I don’t give a shit about what you want. I only need to keep you alive. You mean nothing to me.”

  One second he was there and she was touching him, and the next he was gone as if he’d never been.

  Dante left the underground as fast as he could, before he gave in to her and brought her with him.

  She’s only a human. A means to my survival. Nothing more. He would do well to remember that.

  He’d prowled the wet city of Seattle the previous night, not trusting himself to go back to her after he’d left the meeting at Luukas’s apartment. Disbelief, distrust, denial, anger—he’d experienced all of these things as he’d headed to his favorite hunting grounds. But after the fifth attempt to feed off a different human, he’d finally accepted the truth. The others were right. Laney, the tiny human woman with the balls of steel, was his fated mate.

  It was a good thing he hadn’t killed her.

  Of course, from what Luukas had told him, it was impossible for him to seriously harm her now. His own vampire instincts wouldn’t allow him to harm the only thing keeping him alive. For that’s what she was now. Without her blood, he would die, slowly and painfully. Even if he could force himself to drink from another, or from a bag of donated blood, as Nikulas apparently had before he’d finally gone after Emma, it would do nothing but drag out the inevitable. He would still die. It would just take a little longer.

  Flinging open the lobby door, he stalked down the street to the nearest store that carried human food. He was thoroughly pissed off, although he couldn’t say if it was because he had to go get her food, or because he’d completely forgotten that she needed it. Following the smells, he found a place that was still open and ordered a few sandwiches, remembering to hold the tomatoes. Laney didn’t like tomatoes. She’d taken them off her burger that first stop on the road. He grabbed some bottled waters, then almost walked out without wiping the memory of the kid behind the counter.

  Shea was approaching the apartments from the opposite direction as he got to the door. It was too late to hide from her; she’d already seen him. Besides, Dante hadn’t hidden from anyone or anything since he’d decided to turn the tables on the ones that would hunt him.

  Her smile of greeting turned to a look of confusion as she saw the stuff he was carrying. “Don’t tell me they have you running for snacks for the witches,” she teased.

  He snorted with disgust. “No.”

  Following her inside, he wondered how he was going to lose his favorite Hunter without giving away the location of his little mouse. He’d have to take it up to his place and then take it down to her once he got rid of Shea. “It’s for the dog,” he told her.

  She frowned. “I just got him some dog food last night. And more cat food, too. I left it in your kitchen. Didn’t you see it?”

  “No,” he told her. Truth. “Where have you been?”

  “I just went out to feed,” she answered.

  She was lying, but Dante wasn’t going to press the subject. What Shea did was her business; however, his questioning look achieved what he desired.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow night,” she said as she got off on her floor to go back to her place.

  “What’s tomorrow night?” he asked, sticking his foot in the door so it wouldn’t close.

  “We’re hiding the box, remember?” Shea’s forehead scrunched up in concern. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  That’s right, he remembered now. They were taking the box that Aiden’s female had found and putting it somewhere safe, and out of the apartment building. “Right. Tomorrow. I’ll see you then.” He let the doors close.

  After Luukas had debriefed him the night before last, the other Hunters had filled him in on what they’d found out since Luukas’s rescue.

  Leeha, the bitch that had been made a vampire illegally and banned from their territory, had found a way to capture and hold Luukas in retaliation for his not wanting to make her his queen. She’d done it with a little help from a witch—Luukas’s current mate—by threatening to kill her sister, Nik’s mate, Emma. And that’s where Luukas had been the last seven years, until Nik and Aiden found him and freed him.

  While there, Leeha had also been busy attempting to create her own army of demon soldiers. She’d found them chained to an altar buried in the mountains of Western Canada. Not literally, as they were dead, but their spectral bodies. To release them from the altar, she’d had to provide bodies for them to possess. The bodies of vampires created by Luukas, a Master vampire, seemed to work best.

  She’d even managed to get one into Aiden, and it was still there, though it tended to stay dormant unless it sensed the other demons and roused. Something was going to need to be done about that.

  Any vampires of Leeha’s own creation that she’d sacrificed for possession didn’t last very long, quickly turning into gray-skinned, rotting creatures that were more demon than vampire. Creatures first seen by Emma and Keira when Leeha had sent her minions to collect the powerful witch. Emma had been left for dead.

  These creatures were now all after the box that Grace, Aiden’s mate, had brought here with her from China. They thought it held a clue. A clue to what, no one knew. But Luukas wanted it far away from his witch.

  There was a lot more to the history of the Moss witches that he had yet to be told, mostly something about how they’d all scattered all over the world when the new High Priest had taken over. Only now, after years of hiding, they were reuniting thanks to a small tweak Keira had put in the curse Leeha had forced her to cast over Luukas and his Hunters. Just a little something extra she had done for shits and giggles.

  And Dante had just brought home another of them, out of all the humans he could’ve found in Vegas.

  With Shea gone, he hit the down button in the elevator and took the human her food.

  Not just a human. Laney.

  He would harden himself against his little mouse’s wiles to get him to let her out of her hole. If he let her out, she would run away. She would leave him. She would tell others about him. And then his home would no longer be safe. He would be hunted again. They all would. And he couldn’t let that happen.

  Chapter 18

  Shea knocked on Nik and Aiden’s door. Their apartment was on the same floor as hers and Christian’s, just on the opposite side of the hall. As soon as the elevator doors had closed, taking Dante with it, she’d done an about face. Watching the numbers above the door, she saw it going down, all the way to Dante’s underground hideout.

  Leaning back against the wall, she’d debated whether or not to tell anyone. He obviously had a human down there, nothing unusual about that. What was unusual was that he was taking the person food. Dante had never gone out of his way to keep someone alive before. Something was up.

  Grace answered the door. Her mahogany hair was pulled back in a high ponytail, and her green cat eyes were makeup free. In her hands she held a ball of spines, otherwise known as Mojo, her hedgehog. Or “Prickles,” as Aiden called him. “Hey, Shea. What’s up?”
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  Shea smiled. She liked Grace. “I need to talk to Nik and Aiden. Are they here?”

  Grace stepped out of the way. “Yeah, of course. Come on in.”

  The guys were enjoying their downtime by sitting in the living room, watching recordings of MMA fights. Shea plopped down in the plush chair that was near the window. “Guys, I think something is up with Dante.”

  Aiden held one hand up, palm out in the universal sign for, “You’re going to have to wait, something good is about to happen.” Sure enough, the guy in red shot out a high kick and hooked his leg back around, effectively catching his opponent in the head with his heel and knocking him to the mat. He didn’t get up again.

  Jumping up off the couch, Nikulas held out his hand for a high five that never came. “Yes! I told you, man! I told you.” Dropping his arm, he settled on clapping his hands together and high-fiving himself.

  “Yes, yes, Nikulas. You told me.” Aiden rolled his eyes. Obviously, he wasn’t as thrilled about the results of the match. “It doesn’t mean anything, mate. I’ll still kick your arse later, because you aren’t able to do that particular kick.”

  Nik stopped his happy dance and planted his hands on his hips to frown down at his best friend. “What do you mean? I can so do that kick. I just don’t when we’re sparring because you get all butt hurt if I mess up your pretty face.”

  Aiden scowled back. “Well, there’s no need to be ungentlemanly about it, mate. I thought we’d agreed on that.”

  Nik sat back down. “We did.” Grinning, he looked over at Shea. “What’s up, Shea?”

  “I think something’s up with Dante,” she repeated.

  “Other than the fact that he returned to us with a mate in tow and now has her locked up somewhere in the bowels of the building and is probably forgetting to feed her?” Aiden asked with an innocent expression.

  Shea was confused. “Wait, it’s his mate he’s got down in his torture room?”

  Nik plopped back into the cushions of the couch and glanced over his shoulder to run an appreciative eye over Emma, who’d just come out of their room to join Grace in the kitchen. “Yup. Didn’t you smell her on him?”

  “Well, yeah, but I thought it was just some random derelict that he’d found and fed from on the way home.”

  Grace and Emma wandered over, and Aiden held out his hands for Mojo. The hedgehog grunted at him, crawled up his arm, over his shoulder, and curled up in the hood of his hoodie.

  “What’s going on with Dante?” Emma asked as Nik pulled her onto his lap.

  “He found, and is probably currently shagging, another Moss witch,” Aiden said. “His mate, it seems, as he hasn’t killed her yet.”

  Grace sat down beside Aiden, a look of concern on her face. “I don’t know him, but I’ve heard plenty. Should we be worried for her?”

  Nik shook his head. “No. He won’t hurt her.”

  “Are you sure?” Emma asked him. “He doesn’t seem like the type to sit and listen to reason.”

  “She’ll be fine,” Nik said. “His instincts won’t let him hurt her. Remember how you were all worried about Keira? And see? Luuk never laid a hand on her.”

  Emma gave him a look.

  “What?” he asked innocently. “She’s fine.”

  “Where is she?” Grace asked.

  “Probably in his room in the underground,” Shea answered. Dante would do what he would do. And no matter what the guys thought, that concerned her.

  Grace gave her a confused look. “The underground?”

  “It’s where the monster dwells,” Aiden told her. “The parts where the tourists aren’t allowed because it’s”—he made quotation marks in the air—“dangerous.”

  Emma stood up, knocking Nik’s hand away from her ass. “And you guys are just going to leave her down there? It’s gotta be cold. And wet. She must be miserable.”

  “He’ll bring her up eventually,” Nik told her as he tried to pull her down again.

  “I don’t know about that,” Shea said.

  Emma and Grace looked at each other, and two sets of Moss jaws set with determination. “We’re going to get her,” Grace said. “She’s family. And even if she wasn’t, we couldn’t just leave a human being locked away down there. Come on, Em.” The two witches got up and started walking toward the front door.

  “You two don’t even know where you’re going,” Nik called out.

  “We’ll find it,” Emma answered.

  “Don’t leave the apartment building,” Aiden warned them.

  Shea looked at the two guys. They looked back, and Nik shrugged as Aiden turned the fights back on.

  “You know there’ll be no stopping them now,” he said. “Besides, they’ll never find it. Might as well finish watching the fight and then we can figure out how we’re going to get Dante to allow the female to stay in the protective coven of our witches.”

  “You two are idiots,” she told them, not un-fondly. Getting up, she followed the females. “I’ll let myself out.”

  She caught up to the women pulling on their coats by the elevator. “You two seriously don’t want to go down there. Let me talk to Dante. He’ll listen to me.”

  “No, we’re going to get her,” Emma insisted. “You can make our lives easier and tell us where he’s hidden her, though.” She smiled sweetly.

  Shea couldn’t let them go down there. Dante would be furious if they found his home. And he’d kick her ass if she didn’t try to stop them. The other Hunters didn’t understand why he chose to dwell beneath the city, but Shea did. Sort of. In any case, she respected his wishes to do so. And that he needed his space.

  “Please, let me talk to him. I know he seems all hard and tough and unfeeling, but he has his reasons for being the way he is. And he won’t take you guys coming down there and removing her lightly. Let me talk to him,” she repeated. “And if I can’t convince him to take her out of there, I’ll even help you get her and keep her safe.” She stared at each of them in turn. “But you know, he has to be allowed to feed on her. He’ll die if he doesn’t. There’s nothing we can do about that.”

  Grace and Emma looked at each other, and Grace gave a small shrug. Emma sighed. “All right. You talk to him, Shea. But if he won’t listen to you, then we go after her.”

  “Agreed,” she said. “Give me a night or two. She’ll be okay until then.”

  Emma nodded. “Okay. Two nights. Then I go get Keira and Ryan to join us and we go.”

  Shea stuck out her hand. “Deal.”

  “Deal,” the witches said in unison as they shook on it.

  Now to get Dante to agree.

  Chapter 19

  The following dawn, Dante made his way over the pile of rubble that blocked intruders from finding his home. After bringing Laney some food and water during the night, he’d left her alone. His plan had been to check in with the Hunters and then spend the rest of the night lurking in the shadows of the city. He needed something to keep his mind occupied.

  Instead, he’d found himself in the passageway on the other side of the cave-in within the hour. He hadn’t been able to face her again just yet, though, so he’d taken a seat on the rotting wooden planks that made up the old walkway and kept watch. Nothing would be able to get to her, his hideout was the safest place she could be, but it still soothed him to be near her. He’d stayed there the entire night.

  Once, he’d heard her footsteps on the other side of the makeshift wall. She’d called out to him softly. He’d stood up and opened his mouth to respond, but nothing had come out. A few seconds later, she’d gone back to the room, and he’d sat back down.

  To pass the time, Dante worked on hardening his heart toward the female. The heart he hadn’t realized he still possessed until she’d thrown herself into his arms of her own free will as he tried to drag her to his feeding room. Or maybe that had been nothing more than a desperate act of self-preservation. He wasn’t sure which idea made him feel worse.

  Occasionally, as he kept his
vigil throughout the night, his mind would drift, and the memory of Laney’s nude form—haunting in its perfection—would come to him. He allowed himself a moment or two to enjoy it, however, before firmly shoving the recall away. He couldn’t think about her like that right now. Perfect though she might be, the marks on her belly were but a reminder of what he’d once had, and what he’d so violently lost.

  Dante tried to remember if he’d ever come across a female with those marks before. Surely, he had. Yet, not one came to mind. Of course, he hadn’t paid that much attention to a woman’s body in a long time. Even if he fucked them, he barely looked at them. The blood lust would often blind him to their appearance.

  When he sensed the rising sun, he stood and stretched. He’d come to a decision during the long night hours. A simple decision, but one he did not make lightly. Scaling the wall, he crawled across the top and dropped down to the other side.

  Laney was awake and waiting for him when he reached her. She didn’t greet him, just stood waiting expectantly.

  He held out a hand to her. “Come.”

  Surprise shot across her features, but she didn’t stop to question him. Hurrying over to her backpack, she picked it up and took his hand, allowing him to lead her out of the room.

  Part of him was disgusted at the weakness he was showing, but the other part of him could no longer ignore the fact that he did care somewhat about this particular human’s comfort. Therefore, while the others were all sleeping, he was taking her to his apartment to see her pet, and get a shower and some food.

  But he was staying with her the entire time, and then he was bringing her back.

  Laney was unusually quiet as she hurried to keep up with him. She still didn’t ask what was going on or where they were going. But when they got into the elevator and he lit up the button for his floor, her hand tightened on his. He looked down at her. She barely came to his shoulder. Glancing up at him, her expression was cautiously hopeful.