In the midst of the swirling disorientation and the crippling heaves and a blind panic he couldn’t control, a savior reached out to him. A hand smoothed down his back and stroked him over and over again, the warm palm falling into a rhythm that slowed his racing heart and calmed his head and eased his stomach. When he could, he rolled onto his back again.
In the midst of a blurry visual field, a black translucent figure came into focus. Its face was ethereal, a vision of male beauty in the bloom of its early twenties, but the malevolence behind the shadowy eyes made the visage horrible.
The Omega. It had to be the Omega.
This was the Evil his religion and folklore and training had described.
Lash started to scream again, but the shadowed hand reached out to him and gently touched his arm. He calmed.
Home, Lash thought. I am home.
His head flickered in hysteria at the conviction. He was not home. He was… Sure as hell he’d never seen this decrepit room before.
Where the fuck was he?
“Be of ease,” the Omega murmured. “It shall all come back to you.”
And it did, in a rush. He saw the locker room at the training center… and John, that frickin’ pansy, getting all freaked out when his dirty little secret was exposed. Then it was the two of them pounding it out until… Qhuinn… Qhuinn had sliced his throat open.
Holy shit… he could even feel himself going down onto the floor in the shower, the tiles a hard, wet landing pad. He relived the cold shock and remembered putting his hands to his throat and starting to gasp as a suffocating, choking squeeze overtook his chest… his blood… he’d been drowning in his own blood… but then he’d been stitched up and sent to the clinic, where…
Shit, he’d died, hadn’t he. The doctor had brought him back, but he had definitely died.
“Which was how I found you,” the Omega murmured. “Your death was the beacon.”
But why would the Evil want him?
“Because you are my son,” the Omega said in a reverent, distorted voice.
Son? Son?
Lash shook his head slowly. “No… no…”
“Look into my eyes.”
When the connection was made, more scenes were shown to him, the visions like pages flipped in a picture book. The story that unfolded made him both cringe and breathe easier. He was the son of the Evil. Born of a vampire female held against her will in this very farmhouse over two decades ago. After his birth he had been left at a gathering site for vampires, found by them, and taken to Havers’s clinic… where he was later adopted by his family in a private exchange that even he didn’t know about.
And now, having reached his maturity, he had returned to his sire.
Home.
As Lash grappled with the implications, a hunger swirled in his belly, and his fangs protruded into his mouth.
The Omega smiled and looked over his shoulder. A lesser the size of a fourteen-year-old stood in the far corner of the shitty room, his ratlike eyes trained on Lash, his small body tense as a coiled snake.
“And now for the service you shall provide,” the Omega said to the slayer.
The Evil extended his shadowy hand and beckoned the guy forward.
The lesser didn’t so much walk as move in a block, as if his arms and legs were paralyzed and his body were being lifted and carried upright over the floor. Pale eyes popped wide and rolled with panic, but Lash had other things on his mind than the fear of the man being presented to him.
As he caught the sweet scent of the lesser, he sat up, baring his fangs.
“You shall feed my son,” the Omega said to the slayer.
Lash didn’t wait for consent. He reached up, grabbed that little fucker around the back of the neck, and dragged the guy to his tingling canines. He bit hard and sucked deep, the blood sweet as treacle and just as thick.
It didn’t taste like anything he was used to, but it filled his belly and gave him strength, and that was the point.
As he nursed, the Omega started to laugh, softly at first, then louder, until the house shook from the force of mad, murderous glee.
Phury tapped his blunt on the lip of his ashtray and looked at what he’d done with his quill. The drawing was shocking, and not just because of the subject matter.
The damn thing was also one of the best he’d ever put on a piece of paper.
The female form on the creamy expanse was lying back on a bed of satin, with pillows puffed up behind her shoulders and neck. One arm was above her head, her fingers twining in her long hair. The other was down at her side, the hand resting at the juncture of her thighs. Her breasts were taut, her little nipples peaked for a mouth, and her lips were parted in invitation-as were her legs. Both were open, one knee bent up, her foot arched, her toes curled tight, as if she were anticipating something delicious.
She was staring straight out of the page, looking right at him.
What he’d done was no willy-nilly sketch, either. The drawing was fully rendered, painstakingly crosshatched, perfectly shaded to show the female’s allure. The result was sex personified in three dimensions, an orgasm about to be realized, all the things a male would want in a sensual partner.
As he took another drag, he tried to tell himself that she wasn’t Cormia.
No, this wasn’t Cormia… this was no one female, just a composite of sexual attributes he’d forgone with all his celibacy. This was the feminine ideal he wished he had been with for his first time. This was the female he would have loved to have been drinking from all these years. This was his fantasy lover, giving and demanding by turns, soft and yielding sometimes, greedy and naughty at others.
She was not real.
And she was not Cormia.
He exhaled a curse, rearranged the hard cock in his pajama bottoms, and stabbed out the blunt.
He was so full of shit. Full. Of. Shit. This absolutely was Cormia.
He glanced at the Primale medallion over on the bureau, thought of his talk with the Directrix, and cursed again. Great. Now that Cormia wasn’t his First Mate, he’d decided that he wanted her. Just his luck.
“Christ.”
He leaned over to the bedside table, twisted up another fattie, and lit the fucker. With the hand-rolled between his lips, he started to draw the ivy, beginning at her lovely, curled toes. As he added leaf after leaf and obscured the drawing, he felt as if it were his hands going up her smooth legs and over her stomach and up to her tight, high breasts.
He was so distracted by caressing her in his mind that the choking sensation that usually came when he covered a drawing with the ivy didn’t flare up until he got to her face.
He paused. This truly was Cormia and not a half-her, as his drawing of Bella had been the other night. Cormia’s features were all there, out in plain view, from the tilt of her eyes to the plump of her lower lip to the lushness of her hair.
And she was looking at him. Wanting him.
Oh, God…
He quickly drew the ivy up around her face and then stared at the way he’d ruined her. The shit covered her completely even overflowing the bounds of her body, burying her without putting her under the ground.
In a flash, he recalled the garden at his parents’ house as he had seen it that last time, when he’d gone back to bury them.
God, he could still remember that night with perfect clarity. Especially how the remnants of the fire had smelled.
The grave he had dug was off to the side, the hole in the earth a raw wound in the thick ivy of the garden. He’d put both his parents in it, but there had been only one body to bury. He’d had to burn his mother’s remains. When he’d found her, she had decomposed in her bed to such an extent that he wasn’t able to carry her out of the basement. He’d set what was left of her on fire down where she’d lain, and had spoken sacred words until the smoke had choked him so badly he’d had to get out.