Midnight's Kiss

Nine

The pack of ferals had thinned markedly. Now there were only thirty or so, but those would be the hardest thirty to kill. They were probably the strongest and the smartest of the pack, while she and Julian were at their most tired.

Standing to one side of the open gate, just out of reach, Melly watched them closely until one strained too far between the bars in an effort to grab her. She snatched its arm, hauled it hard against the bars and lunged forward to stake it.

At the same moment, one of the others darted forward to snatch at her. Fire exploded along her shoulder and upper arm, as it raked her with its talons. Shit, shit, shit. Clutching her shoulder, she stumbled back.

Goddammit, Melly — go back to the cell! Julian roared in her head. At the same moment, he lunged at the feral who had attacked her and tore its head from its shoulders. It vanished in a spray of dust.

Quickly, she inspected her new wounds. While they were painful, the deeper muscle underneath appeared to be undamaged. Experimentally, she flexed her arm. Ow, ow. It hurt like hell, but she could use it if she forced herself.

Don’t be a wimp, Melly. Suck it up.

The good news was, the scent of her fresh blood had attracted more ferals away from Julian.

(That was good news? Man, their lives needed to get better fast.)

She told Julian, I wonder when it’s going to occur to you that I’m never going to take any of your orders.

Turning his head briefly, his gaze fixed on her new injuries. He hissed at her before lunging into another whirlwind flurry of fighting.

The sight of him took her aback. Gods, he could be a scary-looking son of a bitch sometimes. Easily the most muscular and powerfully built of all the combatants, he looked every bit as feral as the Vampyres he fought. She was only glad he was on her side.

You’re already hurt again, he snapped.

So are you, she pointed out, exasperated.

One of the ferals was trying to inch behind Julian, its red gaze fixed on her. Ew, it was salivating.

With a massive kick, Julian launched its body into the air. It slammed into a wall and hit the ground, rolled over and started to stalk her again.

Adrenaline tried to dump into her bloodstream, and her body sneered at the effort. Finally, she had to face facts — she was cooked. It took serious concentration for her to remain on her feet, and she didn’t have the physical strength left to drive her stake into another Vampyre’s heart.

Oh, hell. Pulling out the gun, she shot the feral between the eyes, and it collapsed into dust.

I wondered what you were saving those two bullets for, Julian said.

I was trying to hold them in reserve in case Justine returned before we got out.

He told her, Better to use them now when we know we need them.

There was a pause in the battle. Five ferals remained, along with Julian and Melly. Everybody was injured. They all took stock of each other.

Damn it, Melly said. She took the last shot, and another feral vanished in a sprinkle of dust.

The remaining four ferals were the smartest ones of all. They edged back down one of the tunnels, red gazes fixed on Julian’s menacing figure.

“Oh, no you don’t,” he growled. He started after them.

Alarm pulsed. “Julian, no. Let them go.”

“I’ll be damned if I’ll creep through these tunnels wondering when they might come at our backs.” He tossed the keys at her. “Lock the gate.”

Her hands were too unsteady to catch them, and they fell at her feet.

He ran after the ferals and disappeared into the darkness.

This time, she didn’t have any choice but to obey him. She didn’t have the energy to run after them. Nor did she feel capable of guarding the open gate by herself if more ferals appeared.

More ferals?

The thought caused her to sag where she stood. After fumbling with the keys, she found the right one and locked the gate. Then she slid into a heap against the wall while she waited for him to return.

In the normal course of events, she didn’t have a single doubt that he could take all four of the ferals without breaking into a sweat. But he had been fighting for a long time. He was injured again, and before that he had been tortured and drained almost to death.

Closing her eyes, she huddled into herself and whispered, “He has to be okay. That’s all there is to it.”

The way he had kissed her earlier. She touched her lips with unsteady fingers, reliving the moment.

The world was full of beautiful, strong, wise women, but he had held her and kissed her like she was the only woman in the world. The only one. And she had kissed him back in just the same way, because for the last twenty years, he had been the only man.

Not for the first time, she thought to herself, I have to get over him and move on.

The thought didn’t carry any weight. It never had.

Let’s face it. I’m as much in love with him as I’ve ever been, maybe even more so, because after so many years, I sure don’t look at him through rosy-tinted glasses anymore. I see every single one of his flaws all too well, and I love him anyway.

Now what am I going to do?

“Melly.”

The sound of his voice, roughened and gravelly as it was, ran over her like a physical caress. Shivering, she opened her eyes and looked at him.

He stood with a hand holding one of the bars of the gate. In his other hand, he gripped his two stakes. His jeans were filthy, and so was the wide expanse of the bare skin on his chest. Only some of his wounds had healed, she noticed. Precious blood trickled from others. He was dangerously depleted again.

There was worry in his wolflike gaze as he watched her. He said, “Toss me the keys.”

She made an immense effort and flung them at the gate. They skittered across the floor until he stopped them with the toe of one boot.

As he unlocked the gate, she asked, “Did you get them?”

“I got one. The others got away. Maybe I could have gotten them too, if I’d kept going after them, but I didn’t want to get too far away from you.” He knelt beside her. “I need to look at your shoulder.”

“I’m not hurt as badly as you are. I’ll live,” she said, although she let him ease the edges of her top away from her skin. “I was sitting here thinking. You know, I was always the good twin. Bailey was the one who took risks and broke the rules. Now she’s off having adventures in Jamaica.”

“Not at the moment, she isn’t. She’s in LA, helping your mom look for you.” He wore a fierce frown as he inspected her wounds.

With a wave of her hand, she dismissed his words. “Okay, but you know what I mean. Normally, she’s the one who goes off to have adventures. Me, I always followed the rules. Bailey was the spare, but I was the heir. I had to look after things and be responsible. I’m even in the family business. Mom always wanted me to work in admin on the other side of the camera, but she never complained too much. At least my job has been fun.”

“Come here.” Easing one arm around her waist, he lifted her to her feet.

She tried to pull away from him, but he wouldn’t let her. “You’re hurt too. I don’t want to lean on you.”

“Tough,” he told her. “I can take it.”

Keeping his arm tight around her, he held her steady as they walked back to his cell and their meager supplies. Then he urged her to sit again.

“You think it’s okay to take the time?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said. “Our lives have changed for the better. Anthony’s dead, I’m free to act, and most of the ferals are gone. Everything we do down here is a calculated risk, but we need to regroup before we set out.”

“I can’t argue with that,” she muttered.

“Besides, Justine doesn’t know most of her ferals have been staked,” he told her. “If she comes, we’ll hear her whistle long before she gets here, and we’ll have time to get ready for her.”

While he talked, he unbuttoned her top and pulled it open.

They both looked down at her lacy bra, which showcased the full curve and shape of her breasts. She was a C-cup, and she liked pretty underwear.

Now half the bra was streaked with blood. The Vampyre’s talons had missed her bra strap, so structurally it was still functional, but the creamy, delicate material was ruined.

With the tip of one forefinger, he gently traced the skin at the top edge of the bra. “A pity,” he said. “It was pretty.”

“I have other pretty bras,” she said with a small shrug.

He rose to his feet to get the grocery bag. Then he looked around the cell until he located pieces of the T-shirt Justine had torn off him. He picked through the bits of cloth until he finally decided on one. Opening one of the bottles of water, he soaked the rag and carefully sponged her wounds. “This isn’t very clean, I’m afraid. The only other cloth we have is the blanket, and the wool would be too rough on your torn skin.”

“Infection is pretty low on my list of concerns right now,” she told him.

“It isn’t low on my list. The ferals have filthy talons. Their bites are filthy too.” She hissed as her wounds stung, and the skin around his eyes crinkled into a wince. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right.” Grimacing, she turned her face away.

“Were you going somewhere?” he asked quietly.

“What do you mean?” She hissed again as he cleaned out the longest, deepest cut.

“With your story.”

He was trying to distract her from what he was doing. Deciding to cooperate, she took hold of his thick wrist until his gaze lifted to hers.

“All my life, I was the good girl, the responsible one. You were my walk on the wild side, and I truly loved it. I loved you. I had so much damn fun with you. You were all I could think about, even when I had to go on site to Singapore to finish shooting that awful movie. Remember that?”

Reluctantly, one corner of his mouth pulled up. The half smile creased his lean cheek. “The movie wasn’t that bad. Didn’t it win an Academy Award for special effects?”

“It was terrible,” she said with emphasis. “It took forever to film. I couldn’t sleep without you, and the director was always mad at me because I kept forgetting my lines. If I could have gotten out of my contract, I would have, and to hell with my professional reputation. I hated every minute of it.”

He finished washing her wounds, eased the edges of her top together and carefully buttoned it up again. “Where are you going with this?”

She took another fragment of his T-shirt and a fresh bottle of water and began to work on him, washing the dirt and the blood from his chest and shoulders and cleaning out the wounds that hadn’t healed.

She gave him a crooked smile. “I was consumed with you. The mere thought of going on a date with someone else was irritating and distasteful to me. Yes, I was asked out a couple of times, but I didn’t have the time, not physically and not emotionally, and I certainly didn’t have the interest. I don’t know where you got your information from, Julian, but I didn’t cheat on you. Not even with a kiss. Not from the moment you walked up to me at my mom’s house, the night of the Masque.”

He bowed his head, and while he didn’t say anything, for once he wasn’t rejecting her outright or snapping at her, but he was actually listening intently to everything she said.

She told him softly, “I just wanted to tell you all of that, and this time, I didn’t want to make it about me or how you hurt my feelings. I wanted to make it about you. You deserve to know that I thought you were worth it. I can only imagine how I would have felt if someone had convinced me that you had cheated on me, and I’m sorry you had to go through that. That’s all.”

He took her hand with the washcloth and held it, as he studied it. Silence pounded in her ears with the rhythm of her own heartbeat. Then, with a gentle squeeze on her fingers, he eased her hand into her lap and turned away.

Okay, then. She hadn’t really expected anything else.

It had taken twenty years and serious exhaustion and blood loss, but at least now she felt like she had said what she needed to say to him without shouting or fighting. Over the last several hours, the message had grown into something more generous and honest than she would have believed possible.

Maybe that could be cathartic for both of them.

Blinking tears out of her eyes, she tossed the used rag away. Maybe now she really could let go of her bitterness, figure out a way to get over him and move on.

Of course, that was provided they managed to survive getting out of here.

How much weight, Julian wondered, should you give to an old lie?

People lied all the time, and they did it for so many reasons. Self-protection, self-gain. Often it was with the best of intentions, to avoid hurting someone else’s feelings. Hell, he lied without compunction whenever he needed to, or he spun the truth in such a way that it suited him, like he had done in the press conference about the multiple homicide on Justine’s estate.

But this wasn’t just any lie — it was a lie that had stabbed him to the core and had had a pivotal effect on his life.

And he simply didn’t know anymore how much weight he should give to it. He felt adrift, confused again. He was tired of carrying his anger around. It felt heavy, cold and poisonous.

In the meantime, Melly was here in front of him, warm and vibrant, funny, sexy and as infuriating as ever, and man, could she ever sell something. Every word she had spoken felt like the God’s honest truth.

In spite of knowing how well she could act, he still couldn’t bring himself to believe that everything she had said was a lie. Clearly, her message mattered too much to her. It showed in the fragility of her expression, the dampness in her gaze — hell, even in the tenderness with which she had washed him.

Yet she still seemed incapable of admitting that she had cheated. Was it because she couldn’t face confronting him with the truth, or because she couldn’t face the mistake she had made?

Whatever the reason, his thinking had shifted. It wasn’t that she wouldn’t admit to the truth. It was that she couldn’t look him in face and tell him.

After twenty years, you would think they could both let it go.

Maybe that’s what he needed to do… just let it go.

Rubbing his face, he looked at the food. He said, “You never ate your candy bar.”

“I couldn’t stomach the thought,” she said. “Not when you were down at the gate, fighting. I couldn’t…” Her mouth worked. “I couldn’t leave you to face them alone.”

So, tired and depleted as she was, she had come down to fight with him, and had gotten herself injured because of it. Before they had gotten trapped together here in the tunnels, he would have said she wasn’t capable of that kind of loyalty.

And he would have been dead wrong.

He had been fine with fighting the ferals on his own. After all, it was his responsibility as Nightkind King to clean them out. He hadn’t been fine with watching her stumble back from the gate, soaked in her own blood.

Snatching up a bar of chocolate, he shoved it into her hands. “Eat it now,” he told her. “As soon as you’re steady on your feet, we’re going.”

She tore the wrapper open, snapped off a square and popped it in her mouth. “Speaking of getting steady on your feet,” she said around the piece. “When we were together before, I gave enough blood to know just how little you’ve taken from me now. You’ve barely taken a thimbleful.”

“I’ve taken more than that.”

“What,” she retorted, “two thimbles full?”

He thought he saw where she was going and started to shake his head. “No, Melly.”

“Julian, you have to take more. Look at me.”

Her voice was so firm that, reluctantly, he turned to glare at her.

For some reason, that caused her features to soften, and she gave him a remarkably sweet smile. There was so much simple affection in her expression, he lost his ability to keep up the strength in his glare.

She told him, “I’ve collected quite an array of scratches and bruises. They’re colorful, but we both know I’m not badly hurt. Plus, now I have plenty of calories and hydration, which I didn’t have before. The only thing I’m really lacking is proper rest. Since I’m healthy as a horse, none of that should prevent you from taking more of my blood, whereas you haven’t healed again. You’re dangerously depleted, and we’re not out of the tunnels yet.” She paused to search his gaze. “Come on, just a little, one more time.”

It went against every instinct he had to take more blood from her when she was looking so vulnerable. He hated that she was right.

“All right,” he said. “One more time.”

She ate the last of the candy bar and downed half a bottle of water. Afterward, she turned to him and held out her wrist.

This time, when he took her hand, he didn’t lift it to his mouth. Obeying a dark impulse, he pulled her toward him until he could put his arms around her. Her smiling expression turned serious and a little wary, but she came to rest against him readily enough.

He knew he shouldn’t take from her this way. The base of the neck was an intensely sexual way to take blood, but he also knew he was going to do it anyway. Slowly, closing his eyes, he bowed his head to rest his mouth against the warm, soft skin in the hollow where her slender neck met her shoulder.

His body had a memory of this experience. How many times had they shared intimacy in just such a way? Without his conscious volition, his tight muscles relaxed, and he drew in a deep breath just so that he could inhale her scent. When her arms stole around him gently, the embrace felt like a rare, precious gift. She leaned her cheek against the side of his head.

He asked telepathically, Okay?

Yes, she whispered.

He brought his fangs down to her tender flesh and eased into the bite. The quiet hiss of her indrawn breath sounded in his ear, and he held himself rigid, waiting for her to relax. When she did, her body melted against his, and the warm, liquid evidence of her pleasure flooded his mouth.

He took sustenance from her with the greatest of care, cradling the back of her head in the palm of one hand. The pain from his wounds faded so effortlessly when he allowed himself to rely on her. Stirring, she muttered something, what, he didn’t quite catch, but the soft, breathy sound was almost unbearably sexy and went straight to his cock.

Mindful of her shoulder wound, he eased her closer, until the graceful curve of her pelvis rubbed against his stiff, aching erection.

Stroking his short hair, she whispered, “Feeling better?”

He ran the fingers of one hand down her arched spine as he murmured, “Mmhm.” Telepathically, he told her, Thank you.

I’m glad I could help, she told him.

Inside, he hovered at a crossroads. On the one side, sanity and caution, along with the ghost of the old, cold anger and pain, urged him to withdraw and erect all his barriers again.

On the other side lay the memory of warmth and laughter, and dancing in the kitchen to the rich smell of chocolate cake baking, and Melly saying to him with such transparent, inescapable sincerity, I had so much damn fun with you.

How much weight do you give all of that? How did that compare to the weight of one old, tired lie and a betrayal that was two decades in the past?

How much lighter would he feel if he — the meanest, most unforgiving bastard he knew — chose to forgive her and let it all go? How much warmer?

He had taken enough blood. Easing out of the bite, he rested his mouth against her skin, and in that moment, he truly didn’t know which direction he might choose.

Then she made a sound. It was barely audible even to his sharp hearing, little more than a husky catch at the back of her throat.

That was when he realized he wasn’t standing at a crossroads, but at a precipice, and with that tiny sigh of disappointment, she pushed him over the edge.