Beautiful Danger

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.

But if the Order did not police the vampires, then who would? The Council? The little Lark knew about that organization of paranormals who oversaw the paranormal realms was that they watched, and rarely intervened. They would never act against one of their own simply because he’d slain a mortal to feed his blood lust.

Lark felt a hand on her arm. Or maybe Domingos brushed the end of her ponytail. The vampire’s touch didn’t land on her for long, just testing, making the briefest yet cruelest contact.

The longtooth bastards had never touched Todd so gently.

She flipped her hair over a shoulder and pounded the slate tiles with a fist. Through gritted teeth, she growled, “Would you get the hell away from me?”

“You don’t own the roof. I can sit where I want to.” Domingos leaned back on his elbows, stretching out his legs and crossing one ankle over the other. He wiggled his toes. The Order clothing fit him well, and—She wasn’t going to admire him. “Do I bring all this bad stuff up from inside your tender little soul?”

“Tender?” She scoffed. “It has nothing to do with you, vampire.”

“You’re lying.”

“You think yourself far more important than others do, obviously.”

“I am the least important thing to walk this world. Insignificant.”

“Save me the self-pity. We all have our crosses.”

“And yours is dragging through my path to salvation.”

“Poetic.”

“Just making an observation.” He rapped the tiles smartly. “I don’t like to see you sad.”

“You don’t even know me.”

“You are my death,” he said softly.

His words fluttered over her skin like something fragile, too delicate to hold without breaking further.

“Yeah?” Lark dismissed the ridiculous image. “If I’m your death, you don’t look too worried. I can take you out, vampire. I’m just a little…off…tonight. I’m tired. I’ve only slept a few hours.”

“Then we should reconvene tomorrow night. Same roof? Same stake?”

Lark smiled wearily, then tucked her head against her elbow, looking over her arm at him. His crazy smile wasn’t so much insane as charming, and charming promised nothing good for her.

“I can’t figure you out,” she said. “I can see the madness. But I also see a soul behind your fucked-up eyes.”

“I bet you’ve never looked into the eyes of your victims before you stake them, eh?”

“It’s not very smart. Track ’em and take ’em out. That’s the way of it. Live to serve. Serve until death. Die fighting.”

“Is that the Order’s motto? Special. You gotta love an organization that has its own kick-ass yet self-sacrificing motto.”

Lark was amused but couldn’t manage a smile. It was true. The knights kicked ass and sacrificed all for the cause. Rarely did the knight have a family and friends, though certainly Todd had tried. He had known his job demanded all. He just hadn’t realized a family life would demand as much of him. Nor had she.

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