Demon's Kiss

And not just any one of the Chosen. But his. Seth Connor. The young man was in trouble. And the bottom fell out of Reaper’s stomach in spite of himself. The kid was always in trouble of one kind or another, but the pain he was feeling now…This was no minor scrape.

“God, now of all times?” Reaper rolled his eyes and told himself that Seth was proving to be exactly the kind of nuisance Reaper had told Rhiannon he was. He told himself that, even as he stopped everything he was doing to race to Seth’s aid. He reminded himself that there was no choice. He hadn’t been lying when he’d told Rhiannon that he was compelled, as were all vampires, to protect and watch over Seth’s kind. If he could have ignored the call, he thought deliberately, determinedly, he might very well have kept on driving.

Yeah. Right. And just who do you think you’re kidding, Reaper?

So he obeyed his instinctive need to go to the younger man, and go fast. He took an exit, following his senses, his intuition, and as he got nearer, he realized it was a damn good thing he had.

Reaper felt the cold breath of his grim namesake nearby and knew that Seth, his own charge, was near death. He skidded the car to a halt, leapt out, turned and ran, moving so quickly that he was invisible to human eyes. Moments later, he was at the mouth of an alley, where four upright men were kicking and beating one who lay on the ground, curled loosely in on himself.

Reaper didn’t speak, he just moved. His first blow sent one man smashing into a wall, where his head took a chunk out of the cinder block it hit. He grabbed the second one by his nape and hurled him through the air, not bothering to watch where he came down, though he heard glass breaking. He grabbed the third by his hair and slammed his face into the ground. And then he delivered a kick to the solar plexus of the fourth that probably split his intestine apart. And all of it in the space of two seconds, possibly less.

Finally he knelt beside the young man, his cast-iron stomach churning as he bent closer. Seth’s face had been badly beaten. His eyes were swollen and purple, his nose broken, lips split, jaw unhinged or broken. His own mother wouldn’t have known him. Reaper knew him, though. He knew his scent, his essence. His restless, frustrated energy.

As much as he disliked physical contact, there was nothing else for it right then. Reaper slid an arm beneath Seth’s shoulders and lifted his head up from the concrete floor of the alley where he lay. His body was as broken as his face, but it didn’t show as much to the naked eye.

“Did J.J. get away?” Seth asked. His voice was coarse and soft.

Reaper narrowed his eyes, then probed the younger man’s mind and saw the scene unfolding through Seth’s memory. The attack. The other, even younger, man, J.J., being beaten. He saw what Seth had done, taking the attackers on himself to give J.J. the chance to escape. He could easily have gotten away himself, but he hadn’t. Reaper sensed that J.J. had. “Yes, he’s safe,” he said.

Seth sighed and closed his eyes. “I’m glad.”

Seth was dying. Or else he wasn’t. The decision was his.

“Open your eyes, Seth,” Reaper said. “I need to talk to you.”

Seth wasn’t sure if he was alive or dead. The pain was fading, and so was everything else. He felt as if he were falling farther and farther away from everything real. And then an insistent voice, a man’s voice, one that was oddly familiar to him, made its way through a long and winding pathway from his ear to his brain.

“Open your eyes, Seth. I need to talk to you.”

He tried to obey—something about that voice made him want to—but he couldn’t. And really, he didn’t want to, not all that much. He was dreaming about her again. She was so real, so freaking real, this time. He could feel her when he touched her. Soft skin, masses of coppery hair he couldn’t stop stroking. Her petite frame, her soft voice, the uncertainty that always seemed to linger behind her eyes.

“I really don’t have time for this, you know. If you don’t wake up and give me an answer, I’m just going to have to do it without your consent.”

Consent? Do what without his consent?

“Seth, honestly, I’m nearly out of patience.” The man sighed, and when he spoke again, his voice was different. It held some kind of power that hadn’t been there before. “Hear my voice and obey, Seth Connor. My will is yours. Do as I say. Open. Your. Eyes.”

Seth realized he was alive after all. He had to be, to hurt this bad. He supposed he had to wake up and pay attention if he wanted to keep it that way. He hated leaving his dream girl behind, but maybe this way he would get that chance to meet her for real after all. Yeah. It could still happen.

That hope was what drove him to gather his strength, what little remained of it, and open his eyes. Barely. They were swollen and sore, and his vision wasn’t any too clear. But the form that took shape, very slowly, before him, was that of a man, probably no more than a few years older than he was himself, and yet way, way older in some unnamable way.

“I…know you,” he managed to mutter. “I’ve…seen you before.”

“Yes, you have. I pulled you out of the river when you fell in, back when you were ten or eleven. And I dragged you out of the car wreck that killed your parents when you were sixteen, just before it went up in flames. There were countless other times when I helped you out of one scrape or another. None quite this serious, though.”

Seth’s mind was spinning, because all of a sudden he did remember. “How come I didn’t remember—I mean, until now?”

“Because I didn’t want you to.”

The guy hadn’t aged, Seth realized. Of course, he’d been beaten senseless, and his vision was blurry and it was dark, but somehow he didn’t think it was a mistake. The guy looked exactly the same as he had those other times. Dark hair, brooding features, deep-set eyes that almost looked haunted. “Who are you?” he managed to ask.

“Your protector, for lack of a better term.”

“Why?”

“Not by choice, I’ll tell you that much. The rest will have to wait, Seth. You don’t have a lot of time.”

Seth nodded, and it hurt when he moved. “I’m dying, huh?”

“Yes, I’m afraid so. Your mortal life is ending. There are internal injuries. A ruptured spleen, I think, though I can’t be sure. You’re bleeding inside. It won’t be long.” “I didn’t think it would be over this fast.” Seth tried to look around, but there were only out-of-focus shapes in the darkness now. His vision was narrowing, shrinking inward, so he squinted at the man again. “What is it you want me to do, before I…go?”

“I’m a vampire, Seth. I wish I had time to tell you all that entails. But I can only give you the barest of basics. I’m one of the undead. I live by night, and blood, not food, is my sustenance, though I do not need to kill in order to live. That’s a myth. I never age. I’m powerful, strong, fast. My senses are heightened beyond anything you can imagine, and there are extra ones, as well. All of this can be yours, too, if you choose to become what I am. You need only tell me.”

Seth stared at him and wondered if he was hallucinating.

“The alternative is death, and whatever waits beyond that,” the man went on. “The choice is yours. But you need to make it soon, Seth. You won’t be able to remain conscious much longer.”

And in that moment, everything became crystal-clear to Seth. Everything in his life fell into place, all the pieces interlocking, to form the outline of a jigsaw puzzle. There were still pieces missing, almost the entire inside of the thing. He couldn’t see the design, the picture, only that outline, that form. For the first time he could see its shape, see that it was real. This was the destiny he’d been sensing all his life. This was the first step on the path of the life he was meant to live—the path that was going to lead him to her, at some point along the way. He was sure of it. This was the beginning of something big. And as it turned out, it was something far bigger than even he had ever imagined.

“I want to live,” he said. “I’m supposed to. There’s something I have to do.”

“Is there? And what would that be, Seth?”

The man sounded almost amused. Didn’t matter. Seth knew it was real. “I don’t know all of it yet. There’s a girl—a woman—God, she’s something special.”

“Really?” Amusement was shaded by something far darker now. “She have a name?”

“I don’t know it…yet. But I know I have to find her. And I know there’s more—something major I have to do. So I’d better take you up on this…this vampire thing. ’Cause the alternative is to die, and I’ll never get it done that way.”

“You’ll never get anything done that way. So be it, then,” the vampire replied. And then he leaned over, and even as Seth told himself there would probably be some far less dramatic way to accomplish the thing than the one so common in pop fiction, the man bent closer, tipped Seth’s head back and sank his fangs into Seth’s throat.

He felt them pierce the skin, pop into the vein. There was pain, sharp and somehow good, and then there was the most incredible sense of release—not orgasmic, but more like a pressure cooker suddenly letting off steam. It rushed out of him, this pressure and tension and frailty, and pain, too. It rushed out of him with the blood that was rushing out of him, into the vampire’s hungry mouth.

He tipped his head back farther, willing the stranger to take it all, and he felt his life ebbing away, flowing out of him with every swallow the vampire took. And then the creature lifted his head away, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and lowered Seth to the ground.

Seth’s vision cleared, and he lay there on his back, in that alley full of trash, staring up at the glittering stars far, far away.

“You’re dying now. Just as you begin to do so, Seth, I’ll bring you back. Don’t be afraid. Just relax and let it happen.”

Seth tried to nod, but he sensed that nothing moved. Then, just before it all went black, he glimpsed her. Just for an instant. Her long, thick, copper-red hair hung over one shoulder, and her huge brown eyes pleaded with his in a way they never had before. He saw her more clearly, felt her more clearly, than he ever had. Her eyes were darkly lined, exotic and slanted. Her body was small, lithe but incredibly powerful. She was wild, he sensed, and then he sensed something else. She was caged.

She was begging for someone to help her. For him to help her.

It wasn’t a dream. Not this time. It was real. He was really seeing her, somehow, in his mind. It wasn’t a dream. Everything inside him reached for her, yearned for her, and then everything in him simply stopped. There was darkness, silence, no sense, no feeling, and then…

Bam!

Sensation slammed into him like an electric jolt. He went as rigid as a flat-lining patient when the paddles were applied.

But there were no paddles. There was only a wrist, which he was holding to his mouth with both hands, and from which he was drinking just as greedily as if he were dying of thirst.

He felt beyond feeling.

He sensed beyond belief.

He tasted and saw and heard and smelled a million, million things all at once, and knew them all. Jerking the wrist away from his mouth, pulling his head back, he sat there, blinking, reeling.

“It’ll be all right,” the vampire said. “It takes some time, but you’re going to get used to it.”

Somehow, Seth doubted that. “God, she’s real. I mean, I always knew it, but I doubted—I wondered. But she’s real. She’s so real, and she needs me.”

The man frowned at him. “Who needs you?”

“The girl,” Seth told him. “We have to find her. We have to go to her. But I don’t know how. I don’t know where she is, or—”

“Okay, okay, you take it easy now. We’ll get to the bottom of this, all right? Don’t worry. Right now, you just need to…rest. Just rest and let your body adjust to the change. Okay?”

Seth nodded, lowered his head, closed his eyes and muttered, “Okay.”

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